I think it’s been kind of forgotten just how much people used to lie on the internet. Of course we still have our fabulists and our epic liars and so on, but those people are notable now. When I was a kid everyone did it, including me.
When I was about 13-14 - so in the late nineties - things like chat rooms and so on were just starting to become really popular. There was no such thing as livejournal and certainly not tumblr or facebook; nobody was posting selfies and nobody but nobody used their real name on the internet. You were just an anonymous name on a screen. In fact there was a ton of paranoia about giving out real info on the internet - predators everywhere!! You’ll get kidnapped!!
So my friends and I would go online and we would just catfish the hell out of everyone. Typically our fake identities were not all that fantastic or wild. We usually just pretended to be a college aged woman. There was one guy we spoke to regularly and my friends actually roped an uninvolved friend with an older sounding voice into calling this guy; and then they fell around laughing about how he ‘sounded like a loser’.
And you know what? I don’t even know if that guy was real. I don’t think we ever got anything from him beyond a screen name and a phone number; for all I know when they called him it was also three small girls in a coat pretending to be an adult. And I am telling you; everybody we knew did stuff like this. The internet was seen as some kind of boundary-less playground because it was all fake and had nothing to do with real life anyway.
It’s so odd because I don’t lie at all now; I may not give out certain details about myself but the person I am on the internet is the same as real life. It wouldn’t even occur to me to lie.
So I think the reason most of the really dramatic wanks - Victoria Bitters/Andy Blake, Cassie Claire, Ms.Scribe and so on - came about not long after this period. Because it was a very different era. There weren’t many internet sleuths around either, so people were way more likely to get away with making up bullshit for much longer.