MeShell
I just posed this in fakeljers, but figured it would fit here, too!
I post on a message board that's relatively small, but pretty active called Freak Safari. The majority of these members also post or used to post on another, huge board.
There was a member named MeShell. She was 24 and lived in Hawaii. Between these two boards, she has spent probably 4 years with this group of people. For as long as I can remember, she's talked about having Hodgkin's Disease. I don't know much about her other than that. I never really cared for her, so our interaction was limited. She was a super nice girl. Like, nauseatingly nice.
She talked about her cancer a lot. She seemed to be constantly going through chemo and came close to dying a few times. I should have seen the red flags but, again, I didn't pay much attention. Over the course of time, she became really, really close to a lot of the board members, most of which had been affected by cancer at some point or another. Hours were spent on the phone and instant messaging and what not.
One of the mods on FS happened to notice that, like, clockwork, her IP address changed every day around 4 o'clock. The addresses were in Hawaii. The daytime address was tracked back to a school. The nighttime address was in a residential area. This hardly seemed to line up with with her claims of being bedridden.
When asked for her address so someone could mail her a package, she said that she didn't like using her home address, because the kids in the area sometimes stole her mail. She gave a different address, which turned out to be the address of the school that her daytime IP linked to. Phone calls were made and the voice mail was for a woman named Jane Metcalf, who sounded identical to MeShell.
Jane is 52 years old. She works in the IT department of this school. She has a daughter, 21, named Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn is a model and a former beauty queen. Jane was using photos of her own daughter for her e-persona.
What really gets me about this is the length of time she played her charade. Every single day, Jane went to work and spent virtually all day online, on these two boards, pretending to be a sick young woman. She used her daughter's photos to slut it up online with random men. The way she did it was pretty standard and there's no doubt in my mind that a "friend" or "relative" would have popped up soon to announce her death, but... I don't know.
Oh, and she absolutely refuses to admit to any of it. She still maintains that she is, in fact, 24 year old, cancer riddled Michelle. When asked why she would have an IP address from the school, she said that she actually lived on top of the school.
She does have a livejournal, renostarjam.
The whole debacle can be read here:
ETA: This message board is probably not safe for work.
http://freaksafari.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3553
If you've ever seen someone using those pictures, you can bet it's a 52 year old woman.
ETA 2: Unlocking this so people from FS can see it.
I post on a message board that's relatively small, but pretty active called Freak Safari. The majority of these members also post or used to post on another, huge board.
There was a member named MeShell. She was 24 and lived in Hawaii. Between these two boards, she has spent probably 4 years with this group of people. For as long as I can remember, she's talked about having Hodgkin's Disease. I don't know much about her other than that. I never really cared for her, so our interaction was limited. She was a super nice girl. Like, nauseatingly nice.
She talked about her cancer a lot. She seemed to be constantly going through chemo and came close to dying a few times. I should have seen the red flags but, again, I didn't pay much attention. Over the course of time, she became really, really close to a lot of the board members, most of which had been affected by cancer at some point or another. Hours were spent on the phone and instant messaging and what not.
One of the mods on FS happened to notice that, like, clockwork, her IP address changed every day around 4 o'clock. The addresses were in Hawaii. The daytime address was tracked back to a school. The nighttime address was in a residential area. This hardly seemed to line up with with her claims of being bedridden.
When asked for her address so someone could mail her a package, she said that she didn't like using her home address, because the kids in the area sometimes stole her mail. She gave a different address, which turned out to be the address of the school that her daytime IP linked to. Phone calls were made and the voice mail was for a woman named Jane Metcalf, who sounded identical to MeShell.
Jane is 52 years old. She works in the IT department of this school. She has a daughter, 21, named Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn is a model and a former beauty queen. Jane was using photos of her own daughter for her e-persona.
What really gets me about this is the length of time she played her charade. Every single day, Jane went to work and spent virtually all day online, on these two boards, pretending to be a sick young woman. She used her daughter's photos to slut it up online with random men. The way she did it was pretty standard and there's no doubt in my mind that a "friend" or "relative" would have popped up soon to announce her death, but... I don't know.
Oh, and she absolutely refuses to admit to any of it. She still maintains that she is, in fact, 24 year old, cancer riddled Michelle. When asked why she would have an IP address from the school, she said that she actually lived on top of the school.
She does have a livejournal, renostarjam.
The whole debacle can be read here:
ETA: This message board is probably not safe for work.
http://freaksafari.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3553
If you've ever seen someone using those pictures, you can bet it's a 52 year old woman.
ETA 2: Unlocking this so people from FS can see it.