If I seem harsh I apologize, but like I said I've been around forums such as this one for many years and have seen plenty of trolling in my time.
Most notably has to be the time I was on eSportbike and a member there completely duped that entire community. To start off with I had always suspected him of being rather capable of stretching the truth some. For starters he had listed for the bikes he owned, all four of Japans liter bikes... a Kawasaki ZX10, a Yamaha R1, a Honda CBR1000R and a Suzuki GSX-R1000.... all of them supposedly current year models (at the time). Now that's $50,000 worth of motorcycles, and his occupation (or so he claimed) was a United States Army special forces soldier. They just don't pay them guys that kind of cabbage. And anyone who did have that kind of dough to throw into their motorcycle hobby is more than likely going to spend it on a Ducati or MV Agusta or something exotic like that, not all 4 of Japans liter bikes... they just aren't that different from each other.. That would be like having 4 girlfriends, and all of them were 5 foot 5 inch blonds who each weighed 110 pounds with C cup breasts and are all stewardesses... come on, if you're going to live dangerously, at least throw a little variety in there already!
So anyhow we had a very tight nit group of members in there and nobody ever called him out publicly, so his stories just grew more and more unbelievable (to me anyway). Then one day we get a new member, it's his brother, and he's there to tell us all that our friend had been wounded in an explosion while doing a mission in an armored jeep, and was flown to Germany to get treated because his condition was very serious. The entire board was in shock and sent their best wishes along with him, as he informed us that he was on the next flight to Germany to be with his brother.
Over the course of the next week he kept checking back in, telling us his brother had pulled through and was recovering. Then, once he was well enough to type on his brothers laptop, he made his triumphant return to our community and everyone heaped all their well wishes, admiration, respect... you know, everything that a national war hero deserves. But over the next few weeks one of the mods got increasingly suspicious of this character and did a little digging... turns out the guy registered to BOTH of his & his brothers accounts was some guy in his 50's who lived in Mississippi. Never in the Army, never over sea's, and definitely never wounded in action.
The mod immediately called the guy out, and while at first he resisted the accusation, the mod had all the proof he needed. So finally the guy semi-came clean. But now his story was that he was taking a college course and their assignment in his psychology class was to go onto the internet and create a situation that drew on peoples emotions and document their reactions... obviously this was just another load of horse shit.
Now the saddest part of this story was that a super sweet female member of the forum later came out and admitted that through this entire episode they had been PMing each other and she had fallen in love will with him (what's that called? The Nightingale effect, where a nurse falls in love with the wounded soldier she's helping back to recovery? ), and was devistated when the truth finally did sink in.
That really stuck with me, because while I had long suspected this joker was a fraud, i too was fooled by the con and sent him plenty of my own PM's (seems he had private conversations going on with practically every member of the board, just soaking up all the attention he was getting out of this story). Not all trolls take their stories to these hieghts, but sometimes people really do get hurt by these egomaniacs.
That's why when I find something that seems fishy swimming around the net, I hook it straight away and challenge them to bear proof before they get too confident in their story telling. Had I called that buster out waaaaay back when he was just blowing smoke up our asses about all his supposed bikes he had in his stable, then perhaps that girl never would have gotten hurt like she did.
Just figured I'd give you the back story on why I can be suspicious at times, that's all.
