Case 1: J's dying baby.
The story: A woman called J claimed she was pregnant. Her husband was in the Army and had recently been posted overseas. She went into premature labour and was rushed to the hospital. The baby was born - at 26 weeks gestation, with a mass of 880g. He was in the neonatal intensive care unit, quite probably unlikely to make it.

Status: FAKE.

More details: This was the first internet fraud that I was personally involved with. I suppose I need to "thank" J for getting me interested in this topic, such as it is. Blah.

Round about April 2006, I started going to a couple of new irc channels, where I met a woman called J. A few days after I joined the channel, J said that she was pregnant and showed us some blurry ultrasound pictures. She was very excited about the pregnancy and talked about it incessantly - to the point I asked if this would be her first baby. She said "My third - but the other two are no longer with us". That was a vague enough statement that I specifically asked if that meant they'd gone to live with her ex, and was told that they were no longer alive. Over the next few weeks, I wondered why, if she had lost two babies before, she was so excited about this pregnancy to the point of showing ultrasound scans to people on the channel, buying things for the child and choosing names. My existing knowledge of people who've lost babies is that they would be very wary of the new pregnancy, not counting any chickens until they'd hatched - and any joy would be tempered with grief. However, I didn't like to pry, and I figured that the other babies must have been early miscarriages, and she was past that stage in this pregnancy, therefore everything was okay.

When the baby was dramatically born, I wanted to do something. Firstly because she was going to be in hospital for quite a few days, and I had spent far too much time in hospital myself that year. Secondly, I have another friend who really lost her baby - he really existed and really died, and I couldn't do a sodding thing to help. J was in the same country as me and within 30 miles of where I lived. How could I ignore that? So I suggested sending some flowers from everyone on the channel. I was originally just going to order something from an online flower company, but the price of the present was going up & up as people suggested adding teddy bears and balloons - and I'd never intended to ask anyone else for donations towards it. I thought the worst thing imaginable would be for her to receive a hearty "Congratulations on the Birth of your Son" present on the morning of his death, and I wasn't doing anything that evening. So I ended up going to the hospital to deliver the present myself. Where, over a period of 15 minutes, I found that J was lying - there was no patient with her name or any of the aliases she used in the hospital, no baby boy with the name she'd told us, and no patient who even began to match the situation. They had babies in the Special Care Unit, but none that premature born that day.

There were so many warning signs we missed. The biggest one is that when I got back from the shops, J herself was on irc. She said she was typing from a laptop in her hospital bed. I've discovered that this particular claim is a reliable indicator of bullshittery. Most NHS (state-funded) hospitals in the UK do not have bedside internet connections, and those that do generally have them through the TV above the bed. You use the browser with a trackball and a clicky button, and hope you don't have to type - because any typing has to be done via a small rubber keyboard the size of a normal TV remote control. This is extremely slow to use - especially with one or more needles in your arm. More to the point, your typical hospital won't allow any item as expensive as a laptop into the hospital for fear of theft while the patient sleeps, and anything electrical that a long-stay patient brings and wants to plug into the hospital mains has to be tested for safety by their own team of electricians.

Rule 1: Always be suspicious of people online from their hospital bed.

J, however, on irc was typing at her normal speed and with her usual style. It seemed odd that someone that upset would be typing with the same level of spelling and punctuation.

Now, it so happens that I was familiar with the hospital where she was supposedly being treated, because it's where I was born, where I went for physiotherapy in my teens, and where my mum was treated for cancer. Unfortunately, this led credence to J's story - my mum has done nothing but praise the hospital, saying it is extremely high-tech, clean, and efficient. So when J said she was in that hospital I figured it was entirely possible that she had a bedside internet connection, and that it was "real" internet.

Rule 2: Internet fakers tell such a huge web of lies that you end up not noticing the details.

I told J that I was going to come and bring stuff up to her. She kept saying how "overwhelmed" she was that someone would do that. She said she'd told the hospital to deny all knowledge of her being there, because of some ex-partner who she'd had to get a restraining order out on. She said she'd had to wave the court order around a lot.

I should have realised what a crock of shit that was. It's the NHS, forgodsake - the most they'll do is deny access to a visitor, they won't deny all knowledge of a patient's existence! You'd have to go to a very expensive private hospital for that (the kind of place that treats celebrities).

Rule 3: There's always some reason why they can't meet you or show you a picture or tell you their real names.

J, of course, had to conceal her identity from her stalker "ex-partner". Something which could be true, and is very difficult to prove - how many people with stalkers are going to have evidence of that online for you to check out?

Rule 4: If they do give you a "real" name and you try to check it out, you'll discover the person doesn't exist - but then, they'll give you a plausible reason why that was the case!

J had such an elaborate story going on, she'd originally told people that her real name was Selena. But then, when she discovered I was going to the hospital, she told me that Selena was a fake name she'd made up to conceal her identity online from that ex-partner, and her "real" name was Natalija?!

Rule 5: Fakers employ a large number of sockpuppets to maintain their fiction.

We found out that J had "gone into premature labour and been rushed to the hospital" from her "sister", Julie - who had a surprisingly similar typing style to J.

Rule 6: Even when caught, fakers maintain their fiction.

When I got home & logged on, the owner of the irc channel said "J said she was really sorry" and I was like "oh... sorry for what, exactly?". Because I wanted to know for certain whether she was lying before I said anything to anyone else - I was still willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She could have been rushed off to another hospital for some reason, and it was just that the night-time staff only had the records of the current patients, for instance. But the excuse that was given was a medical emergency with the non-existant baby. Supposedly, J had rushed to the Special Care Unit and forgotten to tell the reception staff not to deny knowledge of her to me. Uh... right. So I was forced to tell people that I suspected it might be a fake.

Then I had to go to Paris, because the ticket was already booked and non-refundable, and excuse me, I've just spent 7 hours and £60 rushing around for a liar, I'm not going to lose any more time and money on her. But I kept thinking about the situation, if there was some way to prove for certain that it was a lie. At the hotel, I checked the web forum and saw J had posted a new picture of her "baby" at 8 hours old. I felt I had to know where those pictures had come from - were they photos of a real baby J had lost in the past? Or just stolen from a stranger's web site and passed off as her own?

Google gave me the answer. Random Google searches for "premature baby" and "premature babies" didn't give me anything that looked familiar, even after 15 pages on each search. But then I got a hunch based on the information that had been given - "26 weeks gestation" and "birth weight 880g" seemed awfully precise for a lie. So I tried "premature 26 weeks 880g", and obtained the website of a child called Nathan Windisch. Now healthy and much bigger, the photos of Nathan's first two days (uploaded between 27th July 1998 & 10th September 1998) were horrifyingly familiar.

Rule 7: People with fake illnesses never get better. They have dramatic collapses followed by equally-dramatic recoveries followed by sudden dramatic tragic complications.

Looking at Nathan's pictures, it seemed, suddenly, awfully certain to me what was going to "happen" in the story we were being told. Of course, J's child could not survive because he did not exist, and so J would portray the bereaved mother, and so, too, would we be heartbroken - and she would get so much attention, and it was all for nothing.

Rule 8: Trust your instincts. Always think "is this consistent with what I've been told so far?". Fakers will slip in their lies, no matter how good a liar they are.

Throughout everything she told us, J was entirely believable. She went to great lengths in her hoax - I used the term "elaborate" advisedly. Another simmer, Z, described the story as "heartwrenching" - "how she lost her first 2 boys in the devastating car wreck, how her heartless family was so unsupportive during the ensuing breakdown" - I remember now, why her "sister" "Julie" was the only member of her family she was supposedly in contact with - "the details of her new risky pregnancy, her hopes and dreams for this new baby... it was all very intricate and she was always "on", even down to sending her hubby out to shops late at night to satisfy bizarre cravings". She went into so much detail that it was only tiny things here and there that seemed off, and it was easy to overlook them in the bigger picture.

I feel, at the end of all this, that J needs help and pity, not scorn. What sort of person needs to make up a pregnancy, dramatic birth and dying baby to get attention? What on earth is lacking in that poor soul's life that they need to be the centre of attention in a small community of Sims fans on the internet? Had she presented this as a Sims story, we'd have found it horrible - but also moving and compelling. Why the hell did she have to pretend it was real?