What is the biggest lie you've ever told or been told?

[PippyLongTits]

And did you/the liar admit it when caught out or did you/they double down? Or have you got away with it?

This one is hilarious. 🤣

“I’m single”

Omg, this really gave me a laugh.

You can't leave it there. What happened next?

😂😂

My mother was just an awful person. She walked out, and my dad raised us alone. She repeatedly told me throughout my childhood that I didn't have the same father as my siblings. It caused me to feel like an outsider growing up, I was a lone wolf and just didn't feel like I ever fitted in. As an adult, she still repeatedly said it. I cut contact with her as a teen, but my siblings would tell me she said it. So I did a DNA with my father, and he's very much my father. She's just a horrible woman. Luckily, it didn't ruin the relationship with my dad. we are very close.

My late mother was furious when she found out the I used to write notes from her to be excused from games if it was cold, I was then in my late 40s!

How did that interview go? Did she try to bluff her way through?

I'm guessing she didn't get the job... 🌹

Did you ever get your money back?

My daughter's teacher told us about a wonderful piece she'd written which we recognised as being the basis of Jane Eyre. As he was a friend we never told him of her deception!

Dh’s work colleague.
Went out with her for birthday drinks and she seemed nice.
She later told work she was off ill because her adult dd was seriously ill. Her dd then went into a coma and died, leaving a child who this work colleague had to look after. She had a long time off work.
For some reason when she returned to work she stopped talking to dh and her other close colleagues.
She then moved departments.
Whenever dh saw her she would walk away and ignore him.
Another person was transferred into the department dh works in to replace her. This colleague told dh that the dd was not dead and that as he knew a family member of hers, the colleague had told the same story of her dd becoming ill, going into a coma and dying at her last place of work!
Nobody knows why she did this.

@Newestname002 i did get my money back 3 years later but only because she was buying a £1000 ragdoll cat and she thought i might be miffed she still owed me money.

@Lwrenn I now have an image of you and your family lugging all your wordly belongings in cases and crates onto the Mersey Ferry, as you "emigrate" all the way over to Wirral. 😅

when I was about 10 we had to write a story at school. I used a story I had just read at home and my teacher called my bluff, I pretended I didn’t know about the original - even almost 30 years on I feel mortified thinking about it!

I did something like this when I was at high school! We had to write a short story for English class and the best story would win a voucher for Our Price. (It was a music shop like HMV for the younger mumsnetters!) I basically used one of my grandmas old Mills & Boon romances, chopped and changed the paragraphs around and submitted it. Of course I won and had to read it out in front of the whole school in the award-giving assembly

I even remember one of the lines being something like "motes of dust danced in the shaft of early morning sunlight"

You recognised it as being the basis of Jane Eyre but her teacher didn’t?

Always lied about my current salary when applying for a new job.

@JudgeJ it’s kind of comforting to know that plagiarism was sort of popular with small school aged kids, although still doesn’t stop me feeling clammy when I think back to my crime 😂

She didn't. It was years ago and I honestly can't remember now whether I embarrassed her in public by asking her about her role or just said 'interesting resumé' or just let her squirm. But I did tell the recruitment team afterwards.

This has given me a flashback of a school project from when I was about 11. We’d been studying ancient Egypt, but the end of term project was actually on modern day Egypt (which was actually a good idea in theory, as it encouraged us to think outside of terms of pyramids and ornate coffins etc.).

To jazz it up visually, my mum suggested getting some holiday brochures and cutting out the pictures to include in the project. Unfortunately, the Egyptian pictures were really only stock shots of the pyramids or pics of resorts in Sharm-el-Sheik, none of which really fit the idea. However, there were some lovely pictures of South Africa at the back of the same brochure, and I decided these would fit the bill instead. However, I got a little bit too into my stride, and even included several facts that actually related to South Africa in the project (even with a picture of the “National flower of Egypt” that actually belonged to SA).

I had a slight panic before we got the projects back that I’d be caught and get into trouble, or at least make a fool of myself. (A couple of years before, a teacher had called out obvious plagiarism in one project in front of the whole class, so I worried the same could happen to me.)

I got an A.

I had the opposite, I was accused of plagiarism by an English teacher for a short story I wrote in a mock exam. I had genuinely never even heard of the book they thought I'd copied it from, never mind read it. I remember being outraged, and thinking the book can't have been that great if teenaged me could come up with the same premise on the spot! 😂

My younger sister told her teacher that I had died in a tragic accident......

Yes but knowing the teacher we weren't surprised, it was a Primary school and literature wasn't his thing. He was the NUT rep and had a bumper sticker saying 'If you can read this, thank a teacher' , someone egged on pupils to go up to him and ask 'What does that bumper sticker say Sir?'!

There used to be a wonderful set of book which were abridged versions of the Classics that were very accessible for children from quite a young age, can't recall their name unfortunately.

In my teens I did something similar I've just remembered! We had to write a piece of 'atmospheric' prose that gave a visual image to the reader. I'd forgotten about it and rattled off something last minute. When my parents went to the parents' evening my English teacher asked about my Welsh roots as I had written a wonderfully atmospheric piece set in Wales. My parents were bemused and asked me what I'd written so I confessed to writing a total crib on Under Milk Wood, being a Richard Burton fan I'd heard him reading it on the radio, that the Head of English of a Grammar school didn't recognise it was quite a surprise.

I'm afraid I darkly chuckled at that. Were you quite pleased with yourself at the time, for managing pain and successfully covering up what you'd really done?

I also lied about a serious injury I'd caused myself, and hid the worst of it.
End result was two black eyes, a few weeks of stupidity level headaches, being shouted at a lot for slowness, and nasty stuff put in my eyes daily for supposed pink eye as both eyes were very bloodshot, and other people needed to be protected from it. It took a very long time to go away and I got had many goes at in the meantime, for obviously not keeping my dirty little fingers out of my 'infected' eyes.
No one questioned what I claimed to have done, and I felt I'd otherwise got away with it.

Many many years later, CT revealed evidence of a poorly healed skull and eye socket fracture. I tried glossing over a little but ended up having to tell the truth. So much for getting away with things!