A 24-year-old Moscow hairdresser has sued court marshals for $167,000 for using her photo without her permission to bait debtors on social networking web sites, her lawyer said Monday.
Udmurtia court marshals took photos of Yana Kulikova from her pages on the social networking sites Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki and used them to create accounts on the two sites under the name Elya Kovalevskaya, the lawyer, Alexander Yekim, said.
Posing as Kovalevskaya, the marshals flirted with male debtors by sending messages like “Let’s go to your country house!” and “What kind of car do you have?” in order to find out what kind of property they could confiscate, Yekim told The Moscow Times. “After this, the debtors, of course, thought that Kulikova was a girl of easy virtue, which we consider defamation,” Yekim said.
Kulikova is married, has a 5-year-old son, and “doesn’t write dubious letters to men,” he added.
Kulikova learned that her likeness was being used when Udmurtia marshals boasted on NTV television that they had created Kovalevskaya to catch debtors and showed off the web pages.
Kulikova has filed a lawsuit for 5 million rubles ($167,820) in Udmurtia’s capital, Izhevsk. She has also asked local prosecutors to check whether the marshals had abused their powers.
Repeated calls to the press offices of marshals in Izhevsk and the Federal Court Marshals Service in Moscow went unanswered late Monday afternoon.
A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 23.
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