Little Charly Johns was a trouper.

 

She was only six years old and had cancer - but she fought it with determination. She was in and out of hospital as the disease advanced and retreated.

 

It was tough too for her mother Anna. She joined the Macmillan online cancer forum.

There she found support and help from people who knew exactly what she was going through.

For two years, Anna kept them updated on Charly's progress.

 

"On the whole she is doing great," she wrote. "She is happy, lively, giggly and very easily excitable. She is always the first to laugh at anything and the last to stop. Nobody could look at Charly now and have any idea of the things she has endured these past 14 months."

 

But in November last year, Charly lost her fight for life. On the Macmillan forum there was an outpouring of grief. People wrote poems in Charly's memory. They painted their fingernails pink in accordance with her last wishes - even men.

 

But it was all a lie. Charly did not exist. Neither did Anna.

 

The whole thing was a hoax, discovered when the church in Paris where Charly's funeral was to be held turned out to have no record of her.

 

 

In 2000 it got its own name:

 

It wasn't the first time Macmillan has been hoaxed, and Macmillan isn't the only forum to have been affected by impostors.

 

An American psychiatrist, Marc Feldman, has described it as "Munchausen by internet", similar to the well-known Munchausen syndrome, in which people fabricate illnesses to gain attention and sympathy.

 

It's no exaggeration to say there's an epidemic of MBI, and one which destroys the trust that underpins the forums.

________________________________________________________

 

. . . compared to classic Munchausen's, hoaxing online is easy. There's no need to fool medical professionals.

It gives the perpetrator a quick hit of attention, a feeling of being valued, but without really having done anything to deserve it.

Just as online fraudsters dream of easy money, these people crave easy attention. And it is, perhaps, just another form of fraud - emotional, rather than financial fraud. And emotional fraudsters are no easier to deal with.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18282277

reminds me of a poster on the gay Thailand forums whose name starts with beach and ends with lover

Not long ago I saw a post from someone somewhere (on one of the Message Boards) leading to me to believe the individual mentioned by Christian had finally been exposed, a suspicion that he wasn't who he said he was long harboured by many. Maybe I am wrong and he is still with us (using the same name), but assuming I am right and he has stopped posting, can anyone tell when and how it happened?

He didn't voluntarily stop posting here, he was tossed into the cyberspace bin. He also was tossed into the same bin at Gaybutton's site. I actually don't even want to talk about the creep as he gets off on impersonating someone who he's not and commenting on topics he has no clue about. He's pretty much exposed himself as a fraud over the last 2-3 years on multiple boards (people eventually figured it out) but, as you noted, I'm also fairly sure he's hanging around in other guises (but , if we're lucky, not here). His last main posting bastion was at Sawatdee but then he disappeared (at least for a while) after just about everybody there called him out as a fraud. Like Arnold, I'm sure he'll be back as sickos like that live for the attention even if it's mainly negative.

 

The BL character claimed to be at first a 24-year old Asian living in Australia yet it was remarkable that his language and syntax (other than a "mate" or "crikey" tossed in on rare occasion) sounded like that of an American at least to me. And he then eventually made some really stupid factual mistakes, the funniest one of which was his claim that he saw a fairly scary movie in 1979 (which was somewhat problematic given, according to his story, he was born in 1985).

 

I think that most people on the message boards are who they say they are and generally behave in the same way they would in front of other people; unfortunately, however, the internet does happen to foster and facilitate what I call internet cowards (those who use the anonymity of the internet to say things they wouldn't have the balls to say to somebody's face) and also provides a platform for people playing strange mind games and roles. In real life, our behavior is forever being moderated by the reactions of others to what we say and do; unfortunately, the closeted wackos (those that have minimal social contact or other significant personality issues - the same ones who have been slapped down so many times in real life when they played games or uttered nonsense in person) keep on ticking as a typed "you're nuts" or "fuck off" doesn't seem to have much effect on them.

And he then eventually made some really stupid factual mistakes

 

One was in a discussion about a time when his wallet had been stolen and he was able to get replacement credit cards with just a couple of calls to the US! Now why would a nice Ozzie boy have two credit cards from US banks and none from Australian banks??

 

For someone who allegedly was based in Sydney and who, as he claimed on GB's board, always rose around 5:30 during the week to get to his office early, few seemed to find it odd that a large volume of his posts were made on weekdays between midnight and 03:00 in the morning Sydney time!

 

What I found most odd was that some moderators actually believed his drivel long after other posters had pointed out all the mistakes and anomalies. But at least he seems to have disappeared from that disguise from all Boards for the time being. Perhaps he's finally enjoying his retirement