The Will and Grace star has been slow in adapting to the social networking craze, but Messing was recently forced to sign up for the microblogging site in a bid to protect fans from misleading fraudsters.

She says, ""I knew nothing about Twitter and I had a girlfriend of mine email me and say, 'I have been talking to you for three weeks over Twitter and I didn't know it wasn't you! It's somebody posing as you.' And I thought, 'What?'

""And it turned out there were six people posing as me! And I thought, 'OK, this is insanity, I don't like this, I want to get my name back!' And so I started doing some digging and it turns out that one of the people posing as me was a male firefighter from Los Angeles... (The law has) a fine line - you can spoof or satire somebody but you can't present yourself as speaking their words... So I got it back.""

The actress, who recently got her Twitter account verified, now has over 25,000 followers.