As I looked around for evidence of why women seem to disproportionately perpetrate these scams, I realized something els

The term brutalist web design was first coined by Pascal Deville, a founder of the brutalistwebsites.com. Even if you’ve never heard of this term, I bet you’ve probably visited a few brutalist websites without even knowing. Here’s how Deville defines a brutalist website:,But sometimes scammers choose something more obscure. “People pick esoteric illnesses that people have had very little exposure to so they don’t know what it should look and sound like,” says Feldman. “It makes the deception that much easier.”,Reading over the posts written by “Nurse Tom,” who I suspect was an alter ego, I wonder now if Cindy was just telling herself the things she needed to hear. “I have been a nurse for ten years now and I can honestly say that it has been a pleasure and an honor to work with a patient such as her self,” wrote Tom. “She is my inspiration and why I love coming to work… I am so blessed to call her my friend amongst all of you wonderful people.”,Wright says that the signs of a scam are genuinely unique to each case, but there are some general tells. When someone is blogging about a legitimate illness, she notes — even in the most extreme cases — there are days of tedium: lying on the couch binge-watching Netflix or sitting on the porch, a weary face turned to the sun. “Constant drama is a big red flag,” she says. “[In legitimate illnesses,] every day is not this big dramatic roller coaster, where you have a bone marrow transplant one day and the next day your cousin dies in a car crash and the next day the dog runs away and the house burns down. With the scammers, every day is sweeps week.”,Gonzalez says that women overwhelmingly orchestrate the fake medical campaigns she sees — she hasn’t run the numbers but estimates it could be as high as 95%. “I don’t think they wake up in the morning and say, I’m going to scam someone,” she says. “I think it’s more complicated than that. And I think the basis is found in ‘Munchausen by Internet,’ whether it’s the need for attention or something else.”,I just feel something in the air. I feel an awakening. I have this strong conviction that a large portion of society is just done with the pessimistic outrage culture nonsense. We’re ready to take control of not just the discourse, but our own lives. Personal responsibility is making a comeback and technology is pouring gasoline onto that fire.,Wright says that, at first, she “just felt like Scooby-Doo solving a crime.” But, over time, she saw deep wounds in those who had been ripped off online. “There was all of the same genuine betrayal and hurt,” she says.,Many of us have spent the past year not just coping with the present moment, but getting better. When the conditions are back to normal, we’re already going to have momentum. The golden age is upon us.,As questions about veracity abound, it can be incredibly difficult to ascertain any credible proof about someone else’s illness. We are not entitled to see someone’s medical records, nor are we conditioned to ask. GoFraudMe’s Gonzalez makes the case that GoFundMe has become “like a personal journal,” where people are already revealing intimate details of their lives. “Health is a very private issue but do you still have the right to privacy as a patient if you’re putting your story out there to solicit money?” she asks. “Does giving someone $5 give you the right to ask intrusive questions?” Questions about privacy are also being raised in the context of scam hunter communities harassing individuals, some of whom are legitimately unwell.,Cancer is the most popular choice of internet fakers, says Feldman, in part because of the language and perspectives we have collectively established. “Battling cancer allows a person to adopt a certain heroic stance,” he says. “We talk about cancer survivors as warriors and it all seems so admirable.” In one fraudulent crowdfunding case he studied, a woman shaved her hair and brows, claiming the hair loss was from chemotherapy, and even tattooed the words “won’t quit” on her knuckles. (All of which was, of course, prominently displayed on social media.),On one hand, Cindy’s two-year probation sentence didn’t seemingly square with the level of hurt and exploitation she participated in. On the other, it appears that Cindy was badly damaged almost from the very beginning. One early fundraising post ran through a lifetime of bad luck, including childhood trauma, being placed in foster care, having a pacemaker implanted at the age of 32, and being hit by a car. It’s unclear which of those things are true, but it’s easy to imagine that she was much less content than she appeared when I was initially scanning her Facebook pictures.,I wondered if Cindy’s case was complicated by more than one type of greed. And that marks a fundamental difference between the standard malingerer and Munchausen by Internet, says Feldman. “I think the bulk of people who look to raise money through crowdfunding schemes do so not so much for the money but for the care and concern they’re able to mobilize,” he says. “They tend to be people with poor people skills, people with personality disorders, which means they have trouble getting their needs met in healthy ways and resort to desperate measures.”,Adrienne Gonzalez, who runs the site GoFraudMe, is just as committed to weeding out fakers as Wright. A sample headline from GoFraudMe: “Colorado Woman Accused of Faking Bone Cancer, Stealing From Friends, and Generally Being an A*hole.” The GoFraudMe Facebook page recently chronicled the tales of newly bereaved parents who learned that a fraudster was using pictures of their dead son to raise money and an adult dancer trying to crowdfund for her recovery even though, as one commenter noted, “the video I saw of the fall shows her twerking after.” (It’s worth noting that GoFraudMe tends to report on crowdfunding scams that have already been determined to be fraudulent.),“Munchausen by Internet,” a term coined by Marc Feldman, the University of Alabama psychiatrist who specializes in factitious disorders, describes individuals who feign or exaggerate medical conditions primarily online. They may also create fake “sockpuppet” accounts or alternate personalities — posting as a concerned friend or nurse, for example — in order to lend the ruse greater credibility. Feldman says this kind of behavior disproportionately presents in younger women and posits that’s because women tend to act out in more socially sanctioned ways. “When men act out, they end up in prison,” he says. “Women end up in doctor’s offices.”,Feldman refers to a collection of associated factitious behaviors as “disease forgery:” falsely reporting illness; feigning illness, including episodes like mimicking seizures; falsifying lab reports; exaggerating or aggravating an existing condition; inducing an actual ailment through self-harm; and dissimulating or avoiding treatment so that a minor medical problem becomes serious. But they mostly go through the motions of being ill on social media.