helen-louise's journal

So, anyone who's known me for a while will know that I have a "thing" about internet fakers - you know, people who fake their own serious illnesses or deaths on the internet. Thanks to fake_lj_deaths, I've possibly found the most egregious faker of all time. ( Cut for medical and abuse triggers )

Mystery bear is no longer a mystery. It's a clear case of identity theft, or fraud.

Some asswipe has ordered £278.30 worth of crap using my name and address details, and £277.28 worth of crap using Richard's. To get around the company's requirement that the first shipment must go to the same name and address that you've registered with, they sent us the ugly soft toys. And then the rest of the stuff has gone to them. The stuff ordered in Richard's name is especially hilarious, including 2 Chelsea shirts and 1 Man United shirt - allegedly ordered by one of the most anti-football men I've ever met!

You'd have thought that in a world full of identity theft and online fraud that the company would wait for payment for the first shipment before allowing a person to order any more stuff! Apparently not. Also, I didn't actually realise that it was possible to buy items online using credit set up with the seller, rather than using a credit card issued by a bank. That seems rather anachronistic, considering.

Grrr.

Apparently the address where all these £59 Fred Perry, Ben Sherman and Hilfiger shirts have gone is an address that the company "is currently investigating". If this turns out to be part of a mass fraud, I hope the bastards get what they deserve, which must at least include confiscation of the stolen nasty clothes and an exchange for fashionable prison wear :P

If a creature calling itself Xynar shows up on your web forum, run away screaming. Here follows a topic from Pokecharms that stellarwind yanked due to sheer idiocy of the original poster. I am keeping it for posterity purely and simply because I took 10 minutes of my life to explain networking to him.

( Warning: his original post gave me a headache ;D )

"Baratron is a deluded person who enjoys sticking her nose in things that aren't her own business."
"Baratron was operating on a number of ill-conceived assumptions and false information passed to her."
"In other words, she's pretty fucking stupid."

Niiice.

I'd be annoyed, but I don't care about that person's opinions. His story doesn't add up - "I wasn't in a coma and my assistant shouldn't have said that, I was just unresponsive and in bed for a week". Yeah. Riiight. That's how come you were posting on Warcraft forums. And you expect me to believe that you pay people to play Warcraft for you, and let them use your own personal Gmail account when you're so paranoid about security?

Please. Get a life. You need one.

Another fake internet death. Actually, this one was more of a fake internet coma, but they tend to end in fake internet deaths if the person's lies aren't caught in time.

This one didn't take place on a public forum, but in private email, so there's a limit to what I can say without infringing my friend (the victim of this fraud)'s privacy. But I suppose I can give you a general sketch impression.

So, my friend's friend, X - also an acquaintance of mine - is supposedly in business. (I say "supposedly" because the details of the company he allegedly owns reek of bullshit to me - but I can't go into details.) My friend got an email last week from X's "assistant" at "work", claiming that she was on the shortlist of people that the assistant should contact if anything happened to X. Apparently he had collapsed at work and was in a coma. But he was also described as being "stable" and in "good condition health-wise". That would be where my alarm bells started ringing, and I promptly spent a few hours with the Merck Manual to check things out.

( Read more... )

It gets worse. My friend, quite distressed, emailed the "assistant" to ask for a hospital or other address where she could send flowers. She was told "While cards and gifts would be touching under normal circumstances, they could prove unsettling for him should he experience memory failure." Erm... I read the full text of the two emails together as implying that X knew there was something potentially wrong with him, and had left instructions in case the illness flared up. Even if that implication - that he knew about the illness - is wrong, we are talking about a single condition causing both coma and amnesia together.

Um. There's rather a shortage of those. ( Read more... ) Brain tumours could do it, so could strokes, so could being in a major accident that caused brain injury - but nothing where you were previously healthy and just collapse at work. Some serious illnesses like meningitis and encephalitis could do it - but you wouldn't be described as in "good health" in that case! If there is no real illness that could cause this, then my mind says it must be fake.

But it gets worse. My friend managed to find X's postal address that he'd given her once. We checked it out and obtained a phone number. She called the house and asked to speak to X. The housemate said "just a minute" then "I think he's still at work". As I said to Richard "you ring someone's house, ask to speak to the person, their housemate says "just a minute" then "I think he's at work", that means he's probably not in a coma, right?".( Read more... ) Also, when my friend told me the email address X and the "assistant" had used to send the emails, I googled it along with "2007", and discovered that X had managed to make multiple posts to web forums despite being in a coma. The text of some of the posts were cached on Google, and they were apparently perfectly normal posts from him - and not his sockpuppet "assistant" posting on the forum to tell people he was in a coma.

What angers me about this is the sheer level of contempt that X had for my friend. He has totally underestimated her intelligence and resourcefulness, and the resources she has available. Once I had all of the information, it took me less than 5 minutes to discover that, far from being in a coma, he was still making posts on fecking Warcraft forums. But I still had the courtesy to take the time and effort to check up on his story, to make sure I didn't accuse him of lying when it was real.

Why do people play these kind of games? We have no idea what made him do it. They had been close friends, then they hadn't talked for a few weeks, then he pulls this stunt. I've read a lot now about "Munchausen by internet" and attention seeking behaviour on online forums, and I understand that some people find manipulation of real-life people's emotions fun. But I just can't fucking fathom it. It's bad enough when people do it to whole forums, but in private email? Why do that to someone who you previously called a friend?

I have some advice for the internet fake deathers. Go and play with sims. This kind of manipulation is for pixel people, not real ones. Even better, go make some friends in real life that you actually care about, rather than looking for attention online.

One day, you'll be on the receiving end of a prank like this, and it's going to hurt.

( Footnote. )