To ask if anyone has ever met a Walter Mitty type character?

[Mrspoopoohead]

Just that really it always amazes me to hear how people manage to get jobs impersonating doctors for example. Has anyone had any real life experiences?

Yep! Related to them!

Lies about stuff that doesn't even matter, lied on cv's then shocked when they can't do the job and get sacked, lied about health, relationships, crimes (being witness to - not officially but certain "famous" crimes claimed to know someone attached to the case and be "in the know")...

I do think it's genuinely a mental illness issue but also that they are fully aware it's all fantasy.

They hate not being centre of attention and throw a strop if caught out.

They are no longer in my life and so I don't have to deal with it. I'm still learning some of it though through mutual acquaintances. Now that they know that I'm no longer in contact they seem to feel safe telling me stuff, and it's FAR worse than I previously thought, barely the right side of legal - just barely! Though I have my suspicions about potential fraud, I can't prove it though.

I don't think they're particularly rare, but again that might be personal experience, as I also have a branch of the family that are actual con artists but that has a clear goal I guess so isn't quite in the same area.

What I do think is the person they're deluding the most? Themselves.

Knew a woman who claimed to be a nurse. She was a cleaner in a hospital. Nothing wrong with that but why lie and say you're a Nurse?

Knew a woman who pretended to be moving abroad. She wasn't.

Sad one, a friend of an old friend invented a boyfriend and then got engaged to him.

Knew of a woman that pretended to have cancer. She was vile.

So many weird people!

I did bar work when I was a student. It was surprising how many former SAS soldiers I encountered who wanted to tell me all about their time in ‘The Regiment’ and the top-secret clandestine operations they participated in. All very hush hush, of course, and they shouldn’t really be telling me about it due to the Official Secrets Act. One claimed he was writing a book about his exploits, under a pseudonym, of course, because he didn’t want to become a target for foreign operatives, or whatever.

They were all balding, overweight, unfit looking middle-aged men, drinking on their own during the day. They didn’t seem very bright. I didn’t know whether to laugh at them or feel sorry for them.

One of DP’s siblings met a lovely Oxford-educated solicitor who couldn’t do enough for the family and friends in terms of providing legal advice. Really accomplished guy, with at least three passports.

He was doing some work for a colleague of my DP and had submitted a receipt as part of his expenses but there was some kind of problem which meant the accounts team had to call the receipt’s issuer, who said they had no record of it. Turned out it was forged - pretty skilfully.

As we started asking questions, every single thing we knew about him turned out to be a lie. He wasn’t a solicitor, had never been to the Oxford college he’d claimed, just nothing was true. He’d run up hefty debts in my DP’s sibling’s name.

When he was confronted about it he upped and left, and hasn’t been heard from since. Unfortunately my DP had followed his legal advice on something that ended up costing us thousands and taking years to fix. I sometimes wonder where he ended up.

We lived next door to a bigamist when I was a kid.
Didn’t come out until after he died. He had a ‘wife’ and second family in another city and used to flit between the two.

Yes, as a teen I knew a girl who seemed to live in an alternate reality in her mind. Her home life was awful and I put it down to some sort of escapism and probably the result of a lot of trauma too.

A lot of the people mentioned on this thread sound really mentally unwell tbh.

@Tlollj I’ve also known of a bigamist with two separate families! Weirdly, when he got found out they all came to some sort of agreement and carried on as before

The other thing about my colleague was the lies weren't flattering, they didn't lie to make themselves seem better than they were. Mostly worse if anything. Like being banned from the whole of Wales for violence and they'd be intercepted on the M4 if they tried to go there

My ex DH! He made up all sorts of lies. Not long after we first met he told me he had a son to some ex girlfriend. He told me he was descended from royalty and he should have been a lord!?! He used to sprout forth about any subject except it was all rubbish. Used to quote the bible frequently, tell homeless people to get jobs etc etc. Then to cap it all he took loans out in my name, forged my signature for what I do not know. Everything he bought had to be bigger and grander than anyone else. Needless to say, I divorced him but even now his FB profile says that he studied at a certain University leading people to think he has a degree when in fact he could only stick it out for about 6months because it was too difficult for him.

@Firstinlastout

There's a bloke in our town who has been in the army ,but hasn't done as much as he's made out.Every Rememberance Sunday he sits in the pub wearing medals that he's bought off ebay!Heard a few people calling him Walter Mitty.

That’s what a Walter Mitty is. There’s one in our town who turns up every Remembrance Day in a very smart Army uniform with a load of medals but he’s never actually been in the Army. I’m surprised no one calls him out on it. He’s been doing it since I was a cadet and he’s still doing it now that DS is.

I knew someone who introduced himself as a totally different name to his actual name and pretended to be french when he had no idea of the language.
It wasn't long before he was sussed out but why do it?
Crazy!

My ex. I didn't know it until too late but whenever his mouth was moving lies were dropping out.

He's a malignant narcissist and a workshy little schemer so he has to lie to cover the fact of him being 50 and never worked a year in his life in a single job. Imagine that? That's a helluva of a lot of lying.

Its definitely a mental illness like Trump and I can't for the life of me think why we won't come up with tests that can root out these individuals and bar them from public office and relationships.

There was a woman on my floor at work who started off just fine. She started with small lies which you wouldn't know about such as she had a boyfriend who worked in IT. She then said she had been brought up by he Grandma in Newcastle that was when we starte getting suspicious as people working on my team new that she went to a local high school and know her parents.
Then she told us that her boyfriend had testicular cancer and died over one weekend. I don't think he even existed.
A few weeks later she came to work with a ring on her finger saying she was engaged to a man called Andy Carroll. I didn't know who he was but it turned out he played for Newcastle United. She later came out that she was a psychic.
Its a shame she was a kind kind soul but nobody trusted her.

I worked with a man who we actually nicknamed 'Walter Mitty'. We took him at face value at first, but as time went on we came to realise that even the most mundane things he told us were a fantasy. Too long and complicated to go into here, but it got quite scary in the end when he convinced himself he was in a romantic relationship with a female colleague. He would tell everyone 'their' plans, while swearing them to secrecy because the woman hadn't yet told her husband she was leaving him. The poor woman had absolutely no idea until someone felt she should know what 'Walter' had been saying. Tbh, if I hadn't been there to watch it unfold, I don't think I would ever believed it. It didn't end well, either.

I’ve posted about her before but a woman I work with. Lies all day has pretend conversations. So will speak to someone on the phone, then come off and say well I put him in his place but has been nice as pie.

The other day she referred to an argument I had had that I had told her about in the past, told our mutual colleague I had phoned her in tears. In front of me. I hadn’t done anything of the sort. I was sitting there just .

All the time it drives me nuts and I have no idea how to call her out without looking like a bitch.

Oh and if anything ever happens in the police, her husband who used to be a local police officer will know the police officer involved.

He apparently even knew the guy accused of killing Sarah Everard but they weren’t even in the force at the same time as each other.

I was a a mod on a Loss board and during that time 2 women pretended they had lost babies. One premature birth, one to SIDS if I remember right. It was horrible and upset a lot of genuinely grieving parents.

Deedee Many years ago I worked with someone like that.
She used to lie about everything, no matter how innocuous, often saying stuff that she knew I knew hadn't happened.
I never ever was able to deal with it or confront her, I was always so agog.

A woman who'd been wheelchair bound for five years and had a council house all adapted with hoists, wet room etc to cater to her needs. Had a disability car and husband was her full time carer. Seemed a nice lady and I really felt for her.

Mutual friend on holiday in Scotland saw her WALKING hand in hand, sight seeing with her husband! Took a video and posted it on fb and tagged her in it!

She's in court soon for benefit fraud I believe.

@blissfulllife

A woman who'd been wheelchair bound for five years and had a council house all adapted with hoists, wet room etc to cater to her needs. Had a disability car and husband was her full time carer. Seemed a nice lady and I really felt for her.

Mutual friend on holiday in Scotland saw her WALKING hand in hand, sight seeing with her husband! Took a video and posted it on fb and tagged her in it!

She's in court soon for benefit fraud I believe.

Wow, that’s dedication

I had a colleague who we believe got hired on the basis of fake qualifications, a couple of weeks in and he showed her was completely incapable of doing the job.

I also worked for someone who featured on a BBC show as he was jailed for fraud, I worked for him for about six months and you couldn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth, you name it, he’d done it/had it happen to him, including kidnapping in a third world country... his escape story was something straight out of a Bond film. People who knew him socially thought he was incredibly generous (yes with other people’s money) and a real pillar of the community type. Those who knew what went on in his business saw things a bit differently although I never knew about the fraud until he was being investigated and I had a call from someone who was supposedly part of the investigation saying they wanted to ask me some questions and they would send me a form to fill in and checking my email address (they had the right one) although I never heard anything, I genuinely believe it was him or a friend trying to find out what I’d say if I was spoken to, the caller had the same accent as him but he was also from the same part of the country as the government agency who were involved in the investigation are based in. Thank fuck I said no when he offered to make me a director of the company when I handed in my resignation!

I had a university friend who was always the life and soul, full of stories about incredible things that happened to her. After university we lived together for a while. She went through several jobs in quite quick succession, for a variety of reasons, and also had a cancer scare, and I was worried about her. After a little while other university acquaintances began to treat me oddly. She used my laptop and once left her email logged in, and on a whim I searched for my name. Suffice to say she had fabricated many many things about me, and those ones were just by email. I haven’t seen her for years, but we are Facebook friends. She regularly posts ‘incredible’ stories about things that have happened. Looking back I think she had always been a compulsive liar. I really regret the friends it cost me though.

A couple spring to mind!
First one, someone I used to work with. Always bigs up everything he’s ever done to an extreme extent, so it tends to be vaguely based on truth but blown way out of proportion. Eg he will talk about being a veteran and his time in the army etc, shows up for every army parade etc going... turns out he didn’t even make it through basic training. Hurt his knee in the third week or something. Stuff like that.
Second one was married to a family member, husbands side. He lied about anything and everything, his name wasn’t even his real name! He made out he was an orphan, fended for himself since the age of 14.. his parents lived barely an hour away and he’d actually lived with them til he was 18. He was in the SAS, can’t tell anyone details etc, no one had ever seen any proof of any forces career.
The biggest one was probably his ‘career’. He reckoned he had a massive international business he was running and would disappear off god-knows-where for months at a time, he’d say Singapore but then change it to Vietnam etc. His wife went to meet him somewhere then he’d say he was in another country. He actually disappeared without a trace after the sudden, shocking death of his wife, which was ruled non-suspicious. It was all very fucked up.

I once had a colleague who ever one believed to be profoundly deaf and mute. Then one Saturday i bumped into him in the street and he enthusiastically started a fluent conversation with him. He suddenly remembered I thought he was deaf and he dashed away and he phoned in his resignation on the Monday morning. All very strange, I don't know what he would have gained from his pretence

A young women I worked with lied a lot but the biggest was that her mum had died. She asked that we didn’t send cards or flowers as it would upset her dad, she lived at home at the time. And then phoned to say that if we saw her with her mum it wasn’t her mum but her mums twin sister from Australia who had decided to come and live with them permanently.

There’s a very successful financier who is a fantasist. He donated hefty sums to a London concert hall and other charities and quickly found friends.
He said he spoke fluent Russian so one of his friends introduced him to a famous Russian violinist and the friend said to the violinist that he, the financier spoke Russian. However when the violinist spoke to him in Russian the financier said ‘I’m not in the mood to speak Russian today’

The reason he wasn’t in the mood was because he couldn’t speak a word of the language.
He then told someone that when Putin visited UK the Queen asked him to come in the state coach with her and Putin as he was the only person who knew them both really well and he would not only be a interpreter but also a go between between the her and the President.
Needless to say there was no sign of him in the state coach!

His success and money is not fantasy so I don’t know why he has to make up these stories.