In this brave new world we all now inhabit, strange ways of manipulating people occur daily. In Twitter you get trolls...people who take on a new name and personality to con people or to hurt anyone they see as vulnerable.
A new story I found in the Guardian this morning is very worrying. Munchausen is known to doctors where some people invent illness to get attention. Munchausen by proxy is where a parent invents an illness for a child or elderly relation.
Now a new version has been found in Australia. Munchausen by Internet.
A young woman claiming to have cancer produced her own app and sold it , containing unhappy details of her terminal condition. The most worrying thing about this was that she then went on to publish recipes for various foods which helped or even cured some of her symptoms, so people reading the app tried them to find cures for their own illnesses.
She made money from all of this but also got huge public support and praise for her bravery in the face of such suffering.
A young woman who knew her and her family finally blew the whistle to reveal that she never had cancer....
Of course you have to be sick to perpetrate such an enormous lie over months. The young woman has been labelled a physocopath or a sociopath but many people have been hurt by her writings...she gave cancer sufferers hope. She illustrated that it was possible to beat it, only to be proved fake in the end...
New crimes , new ways of influencing the gullible occur every day....we just have to be aware that on the Internet black can actually be white...and that sometimes we are being conned!
It was all much simpler in the old days!
Posted with Blogsy
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