Often you’ll catch someone on a message board in a lie because something he posted yesterday didn’t match what he told you in a chat 5 years ago. Is he telling the truth now and did he lie 5 years ago, or is it the other way around? Is this his first lie? Hard to tell and even harder to trust him ever again.

In the early days of the internet, there was a saying “If you are chatting with a 21 year old woman, ‘she’ is probably really a 55 year old bald man”. Judging by the frequency with which people tell lies online, in a few cases a 21 year old probably really is a 55 year old. And if we are that bad a judging people online and catching their lies, what if people are pretending to be someone else in an attempt to defraud us and not just to get attention?

Thank you for your post. It reminds us to be careful online.

“Near-fatal bouts of illness alternating with miraculous recoveries.

Fantastical claims, contradicted by subsequent posts, or flatly disproved.

Continual dramatic events in the person’s life, especially when other group members have become the focus of attention.

Feigned blitheness about crises that will predictably attract immediate attention.”

She displayed all of these characteristics. At one point, she was regaling the chat room with a salacious story about how she was “having sex with her fiance on the telemetry floor”. She claimed that all she had to do was pull the curtain around her bed, and nobody bothered them. I asked her how she managed that–presumably if she’s on a telemetry floor, she’s hooked up to, at minimum, a heart monitor. Sexual arousal causes one’s breathing and heart rate to increase. If they’re concerned about her heart, wouldn’t they try to contact her? If she failed to answer, wouldn’t the nurses come rushing in? When I started asking her more pointed, detailed questions about her supposed ailments, and she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, that’s when things began to fall apart for her. I haven’t seen her in that chat room in at least a decade.