When I call the number, it doesn’t go well. After my first question Gabby goes silent. Then she hangs up.

Jessica Simmons, a mother of two adopted children, both of whom she found on Facebook, knows the name Gabby, and that telephone number, all too well.

In August 2016, a young woman contacted her on Facebook, saying she was pregnant. She began to fill in forms with Jessica’s adoption agency, giving her name and address: a small town outside Atlanta. Her age: 23.

“After about a month of talking to her every day, I reached out to one of her family members by private message,” says Jessica. The family member told her this was not the first time Gabby had pretended to be pregnant, and not to trust her. There was “nothing anybody could do to stop her” Jessica was told.

Three years later, a pregnant 16-year-old from Georgia called a Google Voice number on a Minnesotan couple’s adoption page. As they talked with her for hours, they inadvertently recorded part of a conversation.

Listening back to the recording, the young woman’s nasal voice still gets to the wife, making her anxious. “She spoke very low and quiet,” she remembers. “She was very needy and demanding and it made me very uncomfortable.”

As well as the fake Instagram accounts, Gabby also has a personal one. Photos of a curly-haired girl with glasses sit alongside slime-making videos, in which her voice can be heard – it’s the same as in the recording, and it’s the one I heard on the telephone.

Nothing has been posted on this Instagram account since June 2018. There is no mention of babies, adoption or pregnancy. The list of people she is following is revealing, however. It includes Ashley King.

By the time I speak to Ashley a second time, she herself has come to suspect Gabby may be the woman impersonating her, after stumbling across a bizarre series of messages from her on Facebook, most of which she doesn’t remember having received.