I just was thinking about some past hoaxes today and realized I never posted here about the CBC’s 6 part podcast Gay Girl Gone. It was a really good, detailed account of the Amina / Gay Girl in Damascus story.
You can listen to it here: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1408-gay-girl-gone
There was also a fantastic movie about this situation, The Amina Profile, that got across a lot of the ways that people relate online, and what happens when trust is broken, and how investigations can work.
The thing I was thinking about was how I lightly befriended someone on Usenet in alt.ms-something, named Tzipporah benAvraham, and ended up sending her my pretty nice used (used before I got it, but also used by me) manual wheelchair. I felt bad for her and the difficult situation she was describing. The chair it had come to me as a gift out of the blue which changed my life so much. Though I could hardly afford it, I paid the shipping to send it. It was a very emotional moment for me in like 1997 or 1998 when I realized I had been getting along not needing more than my cane for an entire year, and I felt like it was a good celebration of my “not needing it anymore” to give it to someone who needed it.
In retrospect, a year of “not needing it” but also not ever walking more than 2 blocks at a stretch, wasn’t long enough that I should have given away my chair, given that every few months I would end up on medical leave or on crutches or just like, stuck in bed, but at the time I didn’t know that was going to be the pattern of the next few years and I thought I was just magically better. Ha, ha, ha!
Some years later I realized, I can’t remember how, that the person I had sent it to was a notorious troll and hoaxer who reportedly was NOT disabled. She was in early disability anthologies that I own and had read – she won awards for her writing – she was all over disability Usenet. But she was one of those people who would freak out and flame out all over online groups from early BBSes and FIDOnet and ADAnet. She would also make a zillion sockpuppets to argue with herself as well as agree with herself and confuse every issue.
I was extremely annoyed. I wonder if anyone remembers her and her antics and knows something of “the real story” — which I never found out to my satisfaction, both because bitrot and because the trail was incredibly muddled by her million socks.
There must have been other early BBS and early Internet disruptors, Munchausen-by-Internet and other hoaxers. I just wanted to record somewhere that as far as I know, she was one of them.