A 23-year-old university student in Milan has filed a police report after being wrongly identified online as one of the Italian students filmed harassing a passenger on Bangkok's Skytrain, receiving thousands of messages in Thai, English and broken machine-translated Italian.
In an interview with Corriere della Sera published on July 30, Carolina Di Vico, a university student from the Communications at Milan's IULM University, said she has filed a report to Polizia postale after she was wrongly mistook for one of the students in a video that sparked outrage in Thailand.
The video, in which Italian students on a tour of Thailand were seen and heard responding with obscenities after being told to quiet down on a BTS Skytrain, has drawn over 16 million views, prompted an apology from the Italian embassy and led to the group's early return home.
The student said she has never been to Thailand. She said she began receiving thousands of messages in Thai, English and broken machine-translated Italian last Friday — threats, insults and accusations telling her not to return to Asia. Her Instagram account was blocked amid mass reporting, and her university inbox was flooded.
Di Vico said she does not know how she came to be misidentified — possibly through facial-recognition software, or simply through informal crowd-sourced comparisons.
Users pointed to her hair colour, glasses and facial features as "proof," dismissing her denials and even accusing her of using AI to alter her appearance in old photos. Some dug up a 2019 photo of her in a swimsuit and edited it into a mocking meme.
She said the harassment spread to people around her; her boyfriend, friends and a stable where she rides horses. The stable had recently posted about her and reported receiving hundreds of hostile comments. Some of Di Vico's contacts had to remove tags on her photos to avoid being targeted themselves.
The student has reported the matter to Italy's postal police and says she has kept messages, threats and screenshots as evidence, while restoring access to her accounts. She said the incident reflected how online outrage moves faster than verification.
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