Internet Fakery Taken Up a Notch or Two

Anyone who has been active in online communities will immediately recognize the type: Friendly, good (sometimes great!) writing skills, and they always have an amazing story. If you had an appendectomy, they’ve had a double appendectomy while being brainwashed by an evil shrink. If you have an interesting story, they have one even more interesting, usually full of drama and derring-do. Yet they are humble, supportive, friendly. They never want the drama they live — it just seems to travel with them. And they are tossed around by it constantly, eventually seducing their online audience into becoming part of it, too.

Usually you can spot them easily and learn to discount the stories. But some are really excellent writers who weave just enough reality into their story to make you doubt. And even if you question the story, they overcome you with their gentle, friendly, often self-effacing demeanor.

If you work in online communities they’re even easier to spot. Sometimes they even create two personas to chat with one another as a device to work the drama more effectively. If their IPs don’t give them away they usually do it themselves when they forget who they were talking to or what they said and post a reply as the other person. When it happens, the community at large is generally angry, sometimes devastated, but always wiser.

When I saw this BoingBoing post about The Life and Death of Jesse James I knew in my gut it would be the same kind of story. To tell you the truth, I almost didn’t read it because I’ve seen so many of these things gone wrong over the years online and off that I can hardly stand to see another poor trusting soul enlightened. But this one was different. And not so different.

At first I thought it was probably a made-up morality tale, but then I read the comments, which link off to this video and the victim’s own blog where she talks about how she was drawn into the drama to the point of leaving her husband (just in time for her online lover to kill himself) and taking in the author of the scam to live with her. She’d talked to “Jesse” on the phone, but says of those conversations:

I spoke to “Jesse” on the phone often, but he was always whispery and hoarse, because he was shy and didn’t talk much in his 3D life, so his vocal cords were weak, but jesus, could he write. Now, I’m sure we all know people like that, folks who come alive in type but are pretty inept in person. “Jesse” and his family had been exposed to an internet freak who’d been stalking Janna trying to get close to Dan Fogelberg, and had gone as far as to impersonate her on the Dan Fogelberg boards and to telephone her home to freak out her daughter. “Jesse’s” sister made him promise never to expose them to people like that again, so he (and Janna) were very leery of giving out any personal details to people they didn’t really know.

She goes on to describe how her involvement in a life-consuming project and his amazing ability to cancel face-to-face meetings at the last minute came together in a magnificent exercise in denial and intellectual dishonesty that she didn’t really sort out until she actually sat down…and sorted it out, after her friends orchestrated an intervention. Read the story and then visit the blog…this will make more sense.

Where it gets truly bizarre is when “Jesse” dies. The victim writes:

And then, well, “Jesse” died. And Janna was utterly lovely to me. Of course, most of “Jesse’s” other friends were quite horrible to me, because they never understood why he was interested in me in the first place, and constantly criticized me for not making more of an effort to be with him. But Janna was always a comfort, telling me stories, and encouraging me to set up the tribute blog. I was emailing with “Jesse’s” son, who was going to spend time in Spain. I had an address. I was emailing with “Jesse’s” ex-wife and his best friend Cakey. And Annie Martel, “Jesse’s” therapist. I met Janna, and she was real, we spent a few days together driving around Colorado and New Mexico, while she showed me some of “Jesse’s” favorite places. She cried real tears when talking with me about “Jesse” on his birthday. I saw them.

She closes the post with this:

And so I ask myself again, How could I be so stupid? So gullible? So easily deceived?

It wasn’t that easy. But I have no answers for the rest of it.

I hope she figures it out, because she’s not the first and not the last to be on the receiving end of stories like this. I suppose she should be grateful that she wasn’t solicited for money, or that she never really picked up and moved to Colorado to be with “him”.

If you read “Jesse’s” blog, it’s not hard to see where a busy woman locked into a voluntarily loveless marriage could be gullible. Jesse is a man who has drama in his life. High-stakes situations follow him (he’s supposedly a volunteer fireman) yet he’s unafraid to open up the ‘secret parts’ and talk about how he ‘feels’ about things. He was in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; had friends who died in New York on 9/11; he’s a man who fought the good fight for right while doing battle with his own demons — sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, anxiety, PTSD.

But hey, he would talk about it. and write about it. Transparently, and honestly. He confessed on a regular basis, not only in church but to his Internet followers. A man unafraid to have a breakdown in public, out where everyone can see the slow deterioriation of his self-esteem. Someone needy. A rescuer in need of a rescue.

Jesse was tailor-made for Audrey. I mean that. Janna, Jesse’s creator and engineer, figured Audrey out and then created Jesse out of whole cloth just for her. If you can stomach it, knowing what you’ll know after reading Josh’s LA Weekly article and Audrey’s blog, you can read archived posts from “Jesse’s” blog here.

It would be easy enough to shrug and dismiss this story as another idiot being taken for a ride by another internet scammer, except that there’s so much humanity in this one, all the way around. The video shot of Janna after her banishing is pathetic. She’s a broken, pathetic creature who I couldn’t bring myself to hate, no matter how hard I tried. I thought she was…well, ordinary. An ordinary person with a gift for writing in voices. Why couldn’t she have put that talent to useful use? Why prey on the hearts of people she’s never met, who have never done anything to her? I’m sure there’s a zillion psychological reasons, all quite rational, but when you look at that grey, flat, pathetic woman and then try to reconcile her with her inventions, it just doesn’t compute well. Josh Olson describes her this way:

Not just a liar, but bugfuck crazy. Because this has been going on for close to two years, and it’s clearly not about money. This sounds like some sort of weird variant on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental illness in which a parent induces an illness in a child so he or she can be the beneficiary of sympathy.

And Audrey. Someone who was perfectly willing to be needed, to rise to the needs of the needy, seduced by the slow unveiling over nearly two years of a man she found herself needing in spite of her own admission that she didn’t need anyone. Again, I’m sure there are zillions of rational psychiatric explanations. Still, couldn’t it just be a desire to be needed? To have contact with someone who was brave enough to spill their own vulnerability and secure enough to let a relationship grow around it?

This is where online interaction fails. There’s irony in the ending, where Audrey’s “real-life” friends put an end to her pseudo-friendship with Janna and give her the real story. For all of the great stories about friendships made and built online, there’s one of these, and sadly, most times the “real-life” friends are too distant or too busy to pay attention to what an online friend has done to their own.

Update: Liz Ditz (I Speak of Dreams) posted hers at about the same time I posted mine — go read and read her links. She’s got a whole collection of stories like this…I’d completely forgotten about the one earlier this year in the medblogs.

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Tagged as: Blogging, Community, Internet, Scams