Cindy is far from the only young-ish woman ripping off friends and family members on the internet, using social media and crowdfunding sites to raise funds with bogus stories of illness and personal tragedy.
“If I had a typical person I wrote about, it’s a white woman who is 24, a little bit socially awkward, and has experiences with depression,” says Taryn Harper Wright, who ran the popular scam-busting website Warrior Eli Hoax Group.
There’s the sorority girl who faked stomach cancer and had her friends push her wheelchair around to nonexistent chemotherapy appointments; the Alabama woman who stole over $260,000 through social media and two GoFundMe accounts, convincing even her young son that she was dying; the woman dubbed “the photogenic queen” of cancer fraudsters for lying about breast cancer to raise $12,000 in her small community.
The stories of women who fake being sick are sui generis and remarkably similar, rife…
