“When the editors commissioned this article, we all knew there was a chance I wouldn’t live to see it published. I was diagnosed last September with a disease that was chomping through my body with the impunity of a pepped-up Pac-Man in a ghost-free maze. I would be writing about my experiences of a new treatment, in the vanguard of medical technology, but doctors told me to prepare for the worst. I was dying, they said, and may not even make Christmas, let alone now.”
I could go on. I could tell you how agonizing my treatment has been, how the drugs have dulled the pain but sharpened the emotional torment. I could describe the anguish, anger, resentment and waste of someone dying unmarried and childless at 33. I could describe all this in a blog from my hospital bed, and invite you to comment and show your support; to tell me I’m loved, form an emotional bond with a stranger and let me know that we’re battling this monster together.
I could do that, but it would all be lies.
It would be a story, an online fabrication you would stand little chance of disproving. Although you may hate me when you discovered I had lied, and feel betrayed, used and manipulated, neither of us would be alone. People are dying all the time on the Internet — dying through disease, dying in accidents, dying by their own hand — and their deaths are reported in great detail on blogs and discussion forums. Writers present harrowing stories of battles against the odds, tragic tales of misery heaped upon misery, blight following calamity following gross misfortune. Some of the stories sound too tragic to be true. And they are.
Many online tales of death and suffering are works of complete fiction, “pseuicides” dressed up as real-life catastrophes. Some are contrived to titillate or garner attention, some result from something more serious, and some are the result of a uniquely modern psychiatric disorder known as Munchausen by Internet.
“I think the explanations are broader than simply seeking attention,” said Dr. Marc Feldman, a psychiatrist who has studied thousands of cases of factitious disorders, and watched as the Internet has propagated an increase in such frauds. “In some situations, the deceptions are so engaging and heart-rending that I believe there is an undeniable element of sadism.”
In two investigations between 2007 and 2009, I encountered countless examples of fake deaths in all corners of the online world. A contributor to a knitting forum, for instance, faked her death rather than provide patterns she had been commissioned to design. A member of an online art gallery discovered that the 18-year-old, gay, male, lead-singer of a rock band, with whom she had developed a close friendship before he was killed in a car crash, was actually the work of two 14-year-old girls, who had entirely invented his life. A teenage British boy broke up with his real-life girlfriend to marry a 16-year-old online friend, later discovering (on her “death”) that his deceased wife-to-be was a 12-year-old fantasist who had been sending photos of her older cousin and inventing graphic details of incest and rape.
A LiveJournal community, known as fake_lj_deaths, has more than 6,000 members committed to investigating suspicious “deaths” reported on the social networking site. The sleuths are motivated by a desire to spare credulous readers the all-too-real grief and bereavement over the imaginary passing of a sometimes-imaginary friend. “I would venture only one in 10 deaths that we are asked about turns out not to be fake,” said Anne Soffee, the moderator of fake_lj_deaths, the community that has investigated, and exposed, hundreds of such frauds.
The motivations of the fakers are almost as opaque as the fictions themselves, but one clue may lie in the power granted by online communities to quantify the sympathy for an illness or the shock of a death via comments boxes or replies to a journal thread. During a lengthy battle against terminal illness, blog writers can attract support from thousands of friends who follow them through treatments, and who cry real tears when they die. In more than one example, bereaved online friends have created tribute Web sites where they have posted poetry and photographs in memorial books that stretch to hundreds of pages. It feeds the desire of the narcissist and provides the lonely with the attention that they may never previously have known.
“I have never felt more loved and cared for in my entire life,” wrote one faker, named “Sara” in an astonishing confession of a life filled with online deaths. “I suddenly craved for everyone’s attention, love, care, concern and affection . . . People posted messages about how they were very concerned, they were keeping ‘Sara’ in their thoughts and prayers, and so many things. It became more interesting to me. It became very appealing to me. I decided to play with it more. I do not know how or why, I just did.”
R.I.P. ‘LIMEYBEAN’
Any investigation into fake online deaths soon encounters the name “limeybean,” the online moniker of one of the most notorious and far-reaching fakes, which originated in the UK in late 2005. Limeybean was the 18-year-old daughter of immigrants to London, with a family history of tuberculosis. She was a popular and prominent contributor to a Harry Potter fan community, and a prodigious writer of journals, on which she announced one day that she too had been diagnosed with the same rare strand of untreatable TB that had killed her father and twin brother.
As limeybean struggled gamely with her illness, she garnered a huge following of admiring, concerned readers, who offered their support via e-mail and in comments on her blog, sometimes even talking to her in conversations punctuated by coughs and wheezes. When limeybean eventually succumbed to her illness, news relayed on a confidante’s MySpace page, there was an unprecedented outpouring of grief from numerous other friends who had drawn strength and inspiration from her battle.
One of their number, however, was not so credulous. “As a medical student, limeybean’s story didn’t really seem plausible,” said a journal writer named “snellios” in an e-mail to me three years after he investigated the details of limeybean’s illness and eventually exposed it as a fraud. “If you have a rapport with a person you know, you generally give them the benefit of the doubt. With limeybean . . . there came a point where the probabilities of her telling the truth were so low, I wouldn’t have believed her no matter what her relationship was to me.”
Snellios studied the symptoms of TB and compared medical opinion with limeybean’s description of her illness, concluding that the community had been duped, and publishing the evidence on his own journal. “I feel like an a – – hole for rummaging around in what’s done, but everyday I see people citing nonsense without the facts,” he explained as he went public, an apology that was still not enough to convince all of limeybean’s friends.
“I just really hope [limeybean] isn’t up there sitting on a cloud sighing at all the people who totally don’t believe her and call her a liar,” read one post beneath snellios’s expose. “I still love you [limeybean], I really do.”
Limeybean was eventually persuaded down from her cloud as the rumblings of a fake grew louder. She returned to her journal and posted a half-apology, half-self-justification that infuriated those who had trusted her. “All apologies,” limeybean began. “So we’re clear, I had never intended for things to go this way. I had not meant to ‘die’ from the beginning, but I wanted an escape and it gave me one should I ever want to leave. I’ve always had a problem when it comes to telling the truth on the Internet, to be honest.”
She continued: “After realizing the effect my bravery in my illness had on people, I then used it as a vehicle to try and get some of the idiot emo kids on LJ to buck up and realize they don’t really have it all that bad . . . the lie was worth something, wasn’t it? How bad is a lie if it helps?”
Few commentators were understanding: “Holy s – – -, I can’t even think of the proper words to describe the SCUM you are!!! You hurt SO many people through what you did! You are an AWFUL person.”
MUNCHAUSEN BY INTERNET
Although limeybean deleted her journal, and another unrelated user now has the profile, the case has become something of a template for fake online death. Many of the characteristics of the limeybean deception reappear in countless, less sophisticated, ruses, which often share similar inconsistencies and are increasingly simple to detect.
It usually begins with a blogger saying that he or she has contracted an illness, followed by a description of a gradual decline in health, often aided by unlikely and unlimited access to a computer beside a supposed hospital bed. Alternatively, for a short, sharp exit, fakers are “killed” in a horrific accident, often a car crash, before their deaths are announced by close friends or relatives, who just happen to know the password to protected journals and are not too distracted by the mourning process to announce their loss to a group of anonymous strangers.
Although some fakers display a remarkable degree of endurance and research, stretching the fiction across many months of detailed and anguished description, even the most dedicated can slip up. Slight details can introduce contradictions and, while anyone caught up in the deception may be willing to forgive a slight oversight, disinterested sleuths are more ruthless. They are prepared to call funeral homes, hospitals or local newspapers where obituaries may (or may not) be published, and with countless pairs of eyes poring over ever detail, few contradictions escape.
In his 2004 book “Playing Sick,” Dr. Marc Feldman, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Alabama, offers the first published investigation into a disorder he refers to as “Munchausen by Internet,” or MBI, which introduces an online element to the symptoms of Munchausen syndrome, the condition whose sufferers fake sickness and may demand medical treatment for a illness they do not really possess.
“The easy and ready access to the Internet propagates MBI,” said Feldman in a recent e-mail. “In fact, I believe that MBI is more common than MS in ‘real life.’ The reason is that it is so easy to use the net to research medical conditions, post fallacious materials, and engage others without the need to literally enact an illness. Many of these people seem to be very lonely, and the Internet offers a readily and continually-available source of unconditional support.”
In one startling case, a woman from New Zealand named “Sara” approached Feldman with an 8,000-word confession of her own Munchausen by Internet, a story of vast complexity and novelistic detail in which she created more than eight online aliases, constructed intricate relationships between them, and killed at least five.
“As in other MBI cases, one emerges confounded by the extraordinarily bad luck of the apparent patient and her associates, but — with the information having been provided gradually over time — it still struck some people as believable,” Feldman said.
Sara’s story began when she was diagnosed with a rare, but non life-threatening illness, which she began to research online. Soon after discovering an online support community for sufferers, she began to grow close to a number of its members — and, gradually, to exaggerate the seriousness of her illness. She introduced numerous other similarly-afflicted characters, known by medical professionals as “sock-puppets,” to indulge many of her fears and desires and to perform lives — and deaths — that were not her own.
“I started talking to the people in the group as ‘Joanne.’ I got closer and closer to so many of them,” Sara writes. “We formed bonds and friendships, and it made me feel so wonderful. People were so kind to me. People loved me. People cared about me. We opened up about a lot of things.”
As it progresses, Sara’s confession reads like a woman dealing with an addiction, an irresistible compulsion for continuing a fiction that has run out of control. “I thought then that I could stop. I tried to end everything. I stayed away from the computer. I did everything I could. But the power it had over me was so strong. It was like every computer in the world was calling out to me. It became a compulsion. I went back and gave in to the urge.”
Some of Sara’s prose becomes so impassioned that it is tempting to wonder whether even her confession to her psychiatrist is the truth. As she came clean both to the support group and to Feldman, Sara went so far as to provide her “real” name, telephone number and address, inviting those she had deceived to wreak their revenge for her behavior, as if to punish herself for her disorder.
While the suffering of online friends at the hands of duplicitous journal writers is already real enough, fakers can do the most damage in online communities, such as that targeted by Sara. Numerous online support groups offer people affected by illnesses a place to share experiences and receive frank advice and counseling from fellow sufferers. Fakers serve to undermine these efforts and are especially unwelcome.
“Our community is very much a place of refuge and calm,” said the moderator of an online support group for a major cancer charity, who was reluctant to talk on the record and requested that he not be named. “The question of fake users is a very sensitive one, particularly when users invest a great deal of time with someone who is faking. Raising the topic increases suspicions and raises emotions across the site, which can be detrimental to the emotional support that our members are looking for.”
Anne Soffee, who established the fake_lj_deaths community, was motivated by a similar loathing for disruptive fakers. “I didn’t like seeing people use ljers4eternity [a site of remembrance for people who have really died] to get their jollies. We had people who were really mourning, who really lost people, and then some attention-seeking idiot would come in and post about their ‘friend’ who died who in reality was just a character they’d invented and were tired of writing scenes for. And many times, it was just blatant. They were sloppy. And I got disgusted.”
Sara’s deception, although fanatically extreme, was underpinned by a motivation that clearly pre-dates, and will likely survive, any technological innovation for detecting even the most sophisticated fraud.
“Just because it is given a name, Munchausen by Internet syndrome, does not meant that I can or will get away with everything I have done. I am a fake, a liar, a fraud, a manipulator, whatever you call it. I have intense self-hatred and I know that I am pathetic, despicable and evil . . . Everyone wants and needs someone to care for and about them. Humans crave love and attention. We all want to feel loved. We all want to feel that someone actually cares about us.”
From wired.co.uk © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.