Curled your hair did I, Litlte Hawk?

Yes, every online community has certain shades of this kind of behavior but for it to manifest in the full-blown manner as I described, there needs to be a steady influx of newer members in enough numbers to sustain recruitment into either little "gang" or "gangs" as the case may be. While one board will rarely have more than one truly dominent vampire with accolytes, there are often a series of subtle cons going on with accumulated sympathizers.

For example:

On one site that had one of the Death soap operas playing out, there was also a gal soaking up all kinds of sympathy over a fictious miscarriage. She began the ruse by just relating a harrowing miscarriage but the response wasn't terribly high. With so many young female users, miscarriages were common events. people said "gee, I'm sorry " but that wasn't enough. She upped the ante by explaining that her miscaariage was all the more tragic because she was being a surrogate mother for her gay brother and his partner and her miscarriage rendered her incapable of ever having more children. That elicted the desired response and she was love-bombed with symptahy and ROAKS (Random Acts of Kindess). ROAKS are often the desired outcome of a ruse not just for the value of getting free little gifts in the mail but because it brings the ruse offline into real life.

So, we had the "husband" of a "dead" user sucking up sympathy, advice, ROAKS and compassion at the same time as the "Surrogate Mother" suffered a miscarriage of her "gay brother"s baby. Both were being attacked by the same dominant Vampire, let's call her Nissa, and Nissa's crew of lieutenant vampires. Even while that was going on, Nissa and her crew were ever vigilant for any suspect claim of suffering, often spenmding hours scouring hundreds of an individual's posts looking for any subtle inconsistancy and ready to pounce on any new "ruse" worthy of their vigilante attention.

Many people would label Nissa the Vampire and her crew as trolls and they would be wrong. We have trolls here on the Mudcat but I do not believe we have a dominant vampire (almost exlusively a role adopted by females, males have other bullying patterns which don't apply to this discussion).

We have, however, on occasion had troubled individuals peddling ever-increasing tales of woe and tragedy. If you recall some of those threads, you may remember that the set of rules as I described them came into play to a degree. The person(s)gathered supporters, thanked them profusely, was awared ROAKS and caring advice. The person(s) had some naysayers who were often attacked by the supporters. This went on until a new tempest in a teapot came along or until the troubled party moved on. Thankfully, we don't seem to have any full-blown self-appointed avenging angels complete with minions.   

No, in these cases, the threads about the ever-increasing tales of woe served an established purpose - a troubled person in need of support got some whether the siuation described was real or imagined. In fact, we have a number of caring skeptics on mudcat who couch their skepticism in endearingly caring language such as "I don't know if what you say happened as you say but if it did, I am so terribly sorry for all involved and let me add you to my prayers/thoughts/wiccan healing spells/etc and I hope that you feel better." It's actually very touching to see someone holding themselves back from the role of "truthsayer from the darkside"!

I love Mudcat.

Nuff said

PS. Yes, I print out exchanges of these types and keep them in a field notebook. I blackout the real names or screennames and assign them code-names but I do keep a key-book in case I ever have to give printouts to law enforcement and I have had to do that twice.