Mind you it just makes you realise how one can pull the wool over anothers eyes! And also how easy it can be if you have the time.
A good confidence trickster will study his/her/their potential victims for months, maybe even longer. She/he/they could have been on this forum for ages just perusing through threads to gain the knowledge they needed and then play on the empathy, compassion and kindness of real members to get their exploitation started. We don't know, it could have been a young man or woman or even a teenager!
The majority of people in this world are decent and try to live as decent human beings. It is sad that there are those out there that will exploit this for their own gain and hurt those that believe they are genuine. Awful, like stating you have cancer when you haven't to someone who has actually been through it to gain something.
Cold and callous individuals with but one thought.. Themselves..
Yes. Thinking back on some of the posts I read (I only joined at the end of Sept), there were a couple of things I thought 'hang on, that doesn't seem right'. The one about scattering Robbie's ashes in the Black Forest stands out - it just seemed odd - and the fact that, as others have stated, Mrs RS was on the internet immediately after his demise - personally, I would have been in such distress that posting stuff would have been the last thing on my mind, but I put it down to the modern way. I couldn't know about the more technical/medical side of the posts but they seemed to be true because there was no reaction, although there were probably PMs flying off to the mods. Another thing about general forum behaviour/etiquette is that it is very difficult to publicly voice concerns without risking being called out for insensitivity etc (hence the PMs), although I do remember seeing one or two querying posts. If all our speculation is correct (and it seems so), then I am at a loss to understand why these individuals do it. But, as
@kevinfitzgerald has pointed out, the majority of people are decent and kind, and try to help as much as they can, and that's the thing to remember in all of this.
