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I'm going to respond to the original post. Imagine that!
I have come across internet fakers many times on many different types of boards.
I lurk at multiple births message boards and there are tons of fakers there....women who pretend to be having triplets and fake miscarriages, people soliciting for free things for their non-existant children. One faker was a moderator of a parenting board, contacted hospitalized mothers, and was then found out to be lying - she had been pretending to be two different people and had befriended many women and their families.
A lot of the fakers steal photos of real multiple birth children and their families and pass them off as their own, one person was impersonating a mother expecting quints in Arizona. Another faker claimed to be a pregnant mother and would ask for photos from her new friends and it turned out to be a man with a pregnancy fetish.
I actually have a whole section on my multiple births website that outs fakers on multiples message boards, so people won't get duped by them, because I've seen the damage they can do.
A lot of the fakers turn out to be teenagers or girls in their early 20s, most are really self conscious and have bad self esteem or feel that they don't belong at a certain type of message board, so they make up a person that would be accepted, and for the most part their faking is harmless. A lot of them, once confronted, would come clean and post as themselves, and their real selves were always 100 times better than the fake things they made up. Others vanished after being confronted, and the serious ones created huge problems for people, stalking them online, spamming message boards and emails of people, creating more identities etc until they were reported to their ISPs and banned at that end from accessing the websites they were harassing.
People are going to lie on the internet, just as people are going to lie in real life. And people are going to discover those lies at some point. I'd rather have someone tell me "Hey, watch out for this person, they lied to a whole message board." than meet the alter ego, become friends with them and be pissed off when I discovered later that they were fake and no one bothered to tell me.
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