The story: A woman called M, who was previously a popular moderator on a web forum, posted to tell people she had personal problems to take care of and wouldn't be on the site as much as usual. Then suddenly a few days after that her husband posted to say she had committed suicide.
Status: FAKE
More details: People were very upset by M's death, what with it being so sudden, and with her leaving behind an estranged husband and 2 kids. Apparently she died of an overdose. Her "husband" posted on the forum using first a new account that he made, followed by a post from her account, using her password, which she'd left in a text file on the computer "just in case".
Rule 9: Over 50% of fake internet death posts are made from the "dead person"'s own account...
The "husband", D (not the same D as the
fake internet life D!) managed to slip in his lies remarkably quickly. He said that he'd found the passwords when he'd been let into the house to "clean up", yet if she'd died of an overdose, there wouldn't be anything to clean up.
Rule 8: Fakers will slip in their lies.
M was caught in a most unpleasant way for the person concerned. K, the forum owner, who thought she was a pretty good friend of M's, rang her house to find out where and when to send flowers for the funeral - and M herself answered the phone.
Rule 6: Even when caught, fakers maintain their fiction.
M denied all knowledge of being dead, and insisted that her estranged "husband" had made up the story to make her look bad. But how had he obtained her account password? Bizarrely, not only did M have a sockpuppet, she was claiming her sockpuppet was a real person who was vindictive and out to get her! K said various things that M said didn't quite add up.
Rule 17: If a faker claims they didn't commit the fake, it was a "friend" or "relative" doing it as a joke to make them look bad, they are almost certainly lying.
I won't say that they are lying because it is possible for someone vindictive to hack another person's account and post crap as them. Apparently there's even a Friends episode where Ross and Chandler start posting fake updates about each other to their university alumni website: Ross posts a report saying that Chandler is gay, so Chandler posts one saying that Ross is dead. But I suspect the number of not-actually-dead people who were the victim of the prank is much lower than the number of people who were colluding in the prank.
People keep asking what there is to gain from a Fake Internet Death, and I still don't understand. You get attention, but alienate all your friends - who will want to be friends with you when you come back from the dead? That's where
J was actually pretty clever. She didn't fake her own death, but instead the deaths, serious illnesses and strange dramas involving those around her (some of whom may not have existed). Also, her story was consistent and varied little from day to day - which, as you can see from
D, is something the fakers often have trouble with.
Is it worth losing all your internet "friends" for a few weeks of glory? Isn't it better to get your weeks of glory by being good at what you do: whether that's creating Sims custom content, storytelling, or just being a good friend to whoever needs someone to talk to? I can only presume that if they don't see their internet friends as real people with real emotions, then they wouldn't experience any sense of loss if those friends went away. It's sad, though.