This is quite entertaining. We didn’t have internet trolls when I was a kid, and I had to walk the proverbial 20 miles in the snow to school every day. What a wonderful world we live in.
I’m not going to lie and say “I KNEW something was fishy!” in the early days of the umkay posting, although in my defense I did not read the whole thread and missed the claims about scuba diving or skydiving. (Did she really say that she did those things? Or am I misinterpreting what I’ve been reading? I hope I’d have the sense to be suspicious of those claims, but who knows.) Anyway, I admit to having taken the story at face value until the Notokay post.
One thing I did note that I haven’t noticed anyone mention - the umkay persona does not write like a 26 year old; it is the voice of someone older (not necessarily mature, just … older).
When I fell for the troll but noted the discrepancy between stated age and writing style, I thought “hmm, well … when the rest of us are out there hiking or cooking dinner or otherwise not practicing our writing skills, she is most likely writing, reading, or talking, since those are the primary ways she can engage with the world. So she sounds like a more experienced writer because she’s done more writing than most people her age.”
Did anyone else notice the age issue? (Umkay, if you are reading this, take note so you can troll even more effectively next time. Either choose an older character, or study the writing of the young before you post.)
If you Google “Ask the…” type of questions, you’ll find lots of hits. There’s nothing that umkay told us that we couldn’t have Googled ourselves. Vids, too. As far as the personal sex stuff? You can find it in threads or articles. Or maybe umkay knows someone.
Or maybe there’s a girl with a carer that’s really fucked in the head and she’s posing as her charge. I donno.
I wonder where all these “rich bankers” come from? Everyone I’ve ever known who worked for a bank or was in the banking industry, even at the VP level, didn’t make all that much.
(I confess I’m getting this mental image of bewhiskered J.P. Morgan character riding in his chauffeured R.E.O. horseless carriage, beating his manservant with his 100-carat diamond-tipped cane, exclaiming “Oh stuff and bother, we’ve run over another child! Damn your worthless hide, Alexander! Toss them a bag of gold and let’s be on our way!”)
Gee, you must’ve missed the ten other similarities in their biographies I mentioned. Plus the fake death/near-death dealie, the true feather in the cap of any good faker.
Both say both. Read more.
It’s a mommy board. Of course s/he’s going to change posting styles. Boards like that are much “softer” and likely to forbid cursing. Here at the SDMB we can say fuck all we want, so s/he’s more open.
And if you don’t think a troll can change styles as s/he moves through different communities, you’ve never been a board admin.
No kidding. And someone in her condition would need millions of dollars to keep up that lifestyle. Doesn’t she have a house or apartment on the ‘grounds’?
I found her suspicious for awhile and Googled the shit out of what I knew but found nothing. Lack of evidence doesn’t make someone guilty, though. Still…if someone pings your BS meter…it makes sense to prove them wrong. And she doesn’t want to.
It’s possible she’s telling the truth and will just disappear because she’s “better than that”. No worries. I can’t figure out why everyone is so up in arms about it. Oh, wait, she’s a quad. So we have to treat her like a child.
Fuck that. She may or may not be able-bodied, but she’s able-brained. And on the Dope, brains count. This is why we don’t have avatars.
It wasn’t an extremely convincing hoax. It was more or less textbook.
The whole incident is so absurdly tailored toward getting a rise out of people. She’s a young, rich, beautiful disabled girl who discusses her sexuality in an open and frank way, encouraging people to ask her questions, responding to almost everything with, “Oh, well thank you! Now that’s an interesting question! Here’s my response! Also, here’s a cute joke. Look at me, cute! Cute!”
It’s like the people who fell for it are wholly unfamiliar with how people behave on the internet. It was a bare-faced thing she did. It practically sang, “I’m a fraud!”
That sounds oddly like what what Peter Griffin would have a dream sequence about if he ran into a little bit of money…perhaps growing out a stach, getting a monocle, a horseless carriage and mowing down kids in the gutter so he can say things like 'oh stuff and bother" and tossing bags of gold at them"
She uses “KWIM” - that really caught my eye when umkay used it, because I had no idea what it meant, until I sort of worked it out after the 30th time. There are other stylistic similarities, but this was the smoking gun for me.
It is not the same. Fiction is not lies. Not only do people rightly resent being taken once, the natural tendency is to be a little suspicious of similar stories elsewhere. The fake-charity scam makes it harder for the genuine cause.
For reals. Maybe some people don’t have as much Fandom Wank et al in their diet as the rest of us, but how people could not see this blatant bullshit is beyond me.
needscoffee, re: the orgasm description similarities. Because I’m a fair person, I’ll play devil’s advocate for a moment. (Not that s/he needs one since I’m sure Bricker or some other advocate for the defense will come up with plenty of “buts…”)
I’d imagine a quad’s description of an orgasm, if it’s basically “mental” or facial, will be fairly similar. Meanwhile, I found the descriptions of hunger very very different. sezyoo feels lightheaded or woozy; umkay feels hunger pangs in the back of her throat.
Switching back to the prosecution table re: the hunger thing: It’s quite possible the thirtysomething basement-dwelling pretender RPGing these characters just found the intriguing “hunger in back of throat” description on one of the SCI forums he gets off on (maybe apparelyzed.com) and updated his latest character sheet.
Ok so you are super smart in the ways of the internet fraud and some people aren’t. All I was saying is I hope there aren’t a lot of people lording it over others. Kinda like you are doing now. I know you don’t HAVE to be nice in the pit though, So I guess keep the “I told you so” coming.
She said she’d skydived and she had plans to scuba dive.
I mostly did too but I was starting to think her incessant perkiness and posting style was annoying and seemed contrived. But I thought maybe it was just me being a Negative Nelly who should try to stop disliking perky people so much.
True, and she kind of posted like an older person trying to sound younger, with her terms like “BA” (badass) and “get my dance on, yo” and whatever else she said. Not that I don’t use stupid young people terms sometimes too, mostly semi-jokingly, but something about how she did it just seemed fake.
Oh come on fiction is lies, we just know so going it. Acting is lying, but we make it a profession because we get some value out of seeing fake people in fake situations and relating it to ourselves.
I in no way condone what he/she did, it was a real shitty thing to do. But hey it’s the internet, we’re supposed to have our walls up around here anyway. I would be more hellfire and brimstone about it it it WERE a fake-charity scam in the sense of getting money or something out of it, but what happened is some troll got their thrills and some people get some real information that they didn’t know.
I know that some people got emotionally invested as well and I feel bad about that, that’s why He/She is such a cunt.
Also I don’t think anybody is going to be more hard hearted after this. If they cared about a disabled person here then they will continue to care about disabled people, but maybe be a little more discerning.
It’s not a matter of people not being hip to “internet fraud.” It’s a matter of people accepting a story that strains credulity. It’s a matter of common sense. The phrase “you have to take it with a grain of salt” didn’t originate with someone pretending to be a quad on an internet forum.
For a place that prides itself on intelligence and skepticism, it’s more than a little embarrassing.