From The Guardian:

“Anyone following her updates online could see that Mandy Wilson had been having a terrible few years. She was diagnosed with leukaemia at 37, shortly after her husband abandoned her to bring up their five-year-old daughter and baby son on her own. Chemotherapy damaged her immune system, liver and heart so badly she eventually had a stroke and went into a coma. She spent weeks recovering in intensive care where nurses treated her roughly, leaving her covered in bruises.

“Mandy was frightened and vulnerable, but she wasn’t alone. As she suffered at home in Australia, women offered their support throughout America, Britain, New Zealand and Canada. She’d been posting on a website called Connected Moms, a paid online community for mothers, and its members were following every detail of her progress – through updates posted by Mandy herself, and also by Gemma, Sophie, Pete and Janet, Mandy’s real-life friends, who’d pass on news whenever she was too weak. The virtual community rallied round through three painful years of surgeries, seizures and life-threatening infections. Until March this year, when one of them discovered Mandy wasn’t sick at all. Gemma, Sophie, Pete and Janet had never existed. Mandy had made up the whole story.”

Apparently Mandy is a strange, but not so uncommon, variety of internet scam artist, one who uses the anonymity of the online community to steal, not money, not identities, but sympathy, compassion, and time from the most generous and trusting of people across the globe by pretending to be sick. Ironically, the conduct might be an illness itself, which psychiatrists have dubbed “Münchausen by Internet.” [Münchausen Syndrome, in which people physically mimic symptoms in order to get constant medical attention, and that Hollywood favorite (featured in “The Sixth Sense “and many more), “Münchausen by proxy,” in which a parent or caregiver makes someone under their control sick, are both named after the fictional Baron Münchausen, who swore to fabulous adventures that never occurred.]  Individuals with a desperate need for attention become progressively addicted to the cyber-love they can receive through web-based relationships, and become driven to develop increasingly dire symptoms to keep their victims caring.

The life of a fake invalid is hard, requiring months of research and planning to develop and sustain a convincing story, as well as the creation of fictional doctors, specialists and other supporting characters to make the medical histories plausible. It is tempting to shower genuine compassion on these fake compassion-seekers, for they really are emotionally ill. But a strong ethical compass and loud ethics alarms, if these people had them, could have been enough to cure keep the illness at bay. The conduct they engage in involves dishonesty, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, disrespect, lack of fairness, and does tangible harm to others. A strong aversion to lying would be enough to stop this pathological behavior in its tracks, and a commitment to the principles of the Golden Rule, rather than the perversion of it to deceive others, would make “Münchausen by internet” impossible.

That’s right… ethics is not only good, it’s good for you! Just like fresh fruit and oatmeal.

Good for you, that is, unless your strong ethical instincts makes you a victim of someone like Mandy. From The Guardian story:

“No one suffered more from Mandy’s lies than Dawn Mitchell, the 42-year-old Canadian who eventually exposed her. She became aware of Mandy’s plight in 2007, when other mothers on the site signed off their posts urging for prayers and positive thoughts for their critically ill Australian member. “When you’ve got young children of your own, hearing about another mother who might leave her children motherless makes you more emotional.” She began providing the round-the-clock emotional support that Mandy craved. “I could spend an hour with her in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon, then I’d be up at night after the kids went to bed, sometimes until one o’clock. Instead of having a glass of wine with my husband in the evening, I was on the computer listening to Mandy talk about her latest infection,” she says. “She was always on the verge of death. If I denied her and she died, then how would I feel?”

Dawn told the writer that she feels ashamed that she fell for three years of fictitious suffering, and that she genuinely mourned the tragic, unexpected “deaths” of Mandy’s supposed real-life friends, Sophie and Pete. She shouldn’t be ashamed. Her vulnerability was caring, and her strong ethics were exploited by someone with none. Like all scams, the worst damage done by Münchausen by Internet may be that it creates cynicism and destroys trust, making society less ethical by making ethical conduct seem like a weakness.

To the contrary, it is a strength. The problem wasn’t that Dawn had  too much ethics, but that Mandy didn’t have enough.

You can read the fascinating report by Jenny Kleeman here.