I read a statistic somewhere that something like 80% of deaths that are announced online are fake. And tbh I can see how that happens, someone creates a persona, a life, a circle of “friends” if you can call it that, and at some point there needs to be an end to it all.
In fact I know of someone on a different site who has done exactly that on multiple occasions. Created a person with significant health problems, drawn people into their world, become intimately connected with some of them and then, just as they’re receiving the most attention she kills them off, usually by suicide. but of course then she is no longer getting the attention so she starts over with a new character, a new life and so on. I can’t imagine for a second that any of my family would come online to announce my death if I died, so I do often wonder when someone posts that they’re the husband wanting to let everyone know that poster x died yesterday. But of course you can never question it because well, they’re dead. Apparently.
I also think though that there’s a bit of a divide between over-reporting and over-investing. And I think that a lot of posters get away with creating fake stories because others are prepared to invest in them.
I think that a lot of people have a bit of a rescuer complex and that they want to be seen to be the ones who are supporting/helping/saving the person in distress, and that they are the compassionate ones when someone suggests that all might not be as it seems.
I’ve seen posts on here where posters have offered money, and even a bed for the night to someone they know only from a username on the internet. Years ago there was one who claimed to be escaping from an abusive relationship abroad, and posters even suggested how they could get her a fake passport so she could enter the country. A whole support thread was set up, with people arranging a house, clothes for her children, money for her to live on for the time being and then it turned out to all be fake.
But even if it isn’t, offering a complete stranger a place in your house where your children also are is never a good idea.
Way back when mn was a much smaller site, there were individual posters whose real stories were known and followed, and where support was given, e.g. misdee whose dh was going through heart problems and had a heart transplant, when they got the call a lot of posters were on the threads waiting for updates from one of her family who was also a mn’er. In fact I often wonder how she and her DH are now.
But as the site has got bigger two things have happened:
1, people have seen the support given in the past and decided that this would be a good way to cash in, so to speak, and B, there are far more posters, so stories aren’t as widely followed now as they used to be, and more people are therefore more suspicious.