Caught red handed with your pants around your ankles.

We were procrastinating in class today and our instructor showed us this...

http://www.anzmi.net/cases.html

It's a site dedicated to exposing fraudsters posing as members of the military in Australia and New Zealand going as far as to wear fake medals and taking the identities of real soldiers.

Focus: Fakes, liars and cheats. What are the sketchiest lies and masquerades you have caught people in?

Alt Focus: What is the most outrageous story you have passed off as truth and everyone believing?

 

Bump.

 

Didn't we just have a Lance Armstrong thread?

 

And a Te'o one?

 

Focus: I worked as an extra on some of the combat scenes in Captain America a couple years back (the one where they storm the Hydra fortress, for those who've seen it) and ran into a pathological liar. Because the scenes we were filming involved a lot of blank-firing weapons and to help with the overall realism of the thing (HA!) they'd shipped in a bunch of ex-military guys to handle the various Thompsons and M1 Garands. Mixed in with this core were a bunch of regular extras who'd been given rubber weapons. One of these guys began running his mouth, claiming that he should be given a blank-firing weapon because of his extensive military experience. Given that most of the people there on the day were ex-soldiers, this obviously sparked some curiosity. In the space of a day's worth of shooting, the guy managed to claim:

- That he'd joined as a "boy soldier" at age 16, but been promoted to Captain since then (he was 21 at the time), meaning he'd managed to go from private, to corporal, to sergeant, to senior NCO, then gotten himself selected for Officer Training, gone to Sandhurst, been commissioned a Second Lieutenant, been promoted to Lieutenant, and finally been promoted to Captain, spending significantly less than a year in each rank and concluding a career path which the most dedicated and professional candidates manage in about two decades in the space of five years.

- That he was a member of some shadowy Special Forces unit which he couldn't name but was apparently even more hardcore than the SAS, whom he referred to as "pussies", but was on extended leave at the moment (which was why he was working as an extra, obviously)

- That he'd been to Afghanistan four times, and killed an unquantifiable amount of "tangos".

He was eventually caught out (as if the lies weren't outrageous enough) when an actual vet asked him his Army Number, which goes on every single scrap of paperwork ever associated with you from the moment you join and is basically more important than your name. In his nineties, my great-grandfather could still remember his from seventy years earlier. He first said he couldn't remember it, then tried to claim that "his unit" never bothered with army numbers, and finally, pushed into a corner, came up with a number which, by the vet's reckoning, would have made him an enlisted man sometime around the Falklands War. Finally, the film's combat scenes coordinator, who was an ex-paratrooper, caught wind of all his bullshit and had him kicked off the set. Quite what the idiot hoped to achieve making up high-flying crap while surrounded by precisely the type of people who would be in the perfect position to call him out, I have no idea.


Alt Focus:

Not especially difficult given my target audience at the time, but I once convinced a cataclysmically idiotic girl that I was an MI6 agent. We were hosting a party at our house and she showed up as a friend of a friend, I got chatting with her until my mobile rang. Since I'm bilingual and the person who called was Italian, I answered with a fluent Italian accent, prompting her to exclaim:
"Oh my god! I didn't realise you spoke Spanish so well! Why did you learn that?"
*Inward cringe* "It's actually Italian. And it's because I'm an undercover operative, ha ha!"
"REEEEALLLY!! Oh my god, like James Bond?"
Having realised the calibre of person I was dealing with here (she'd seemed fairly normal up until that point, possibly because I was intoxicated) I took her to my room where, in the top drawer of my bedside table, was a fairly believable "spy stash" composed of my Italian passport (fake ID obviously) a wad of Euros in a money clip, a tacticool folding knife, and a couple of shotgun shells that I'd forgotten at the bottom of my rucksack when I flew over and hadn't gotten around to disposing of. I also showed her Google Earth on my laptop (this was in 2007, so it was still in its infancy) and explained that it was the MI6 satellite. I then proceeded to zoom in on our building, all of which was accompanied by awestruck "oohs" and "aahs". I never did have the heart to tell her the truth, so presumably, there's still a girl wandering around somewhere (provided she hasn't tried to breathe underwater or crossed a road with her eyes closed) who thinks that I'm a secret agent.


P.S. Hi there y'all, it's been a while.

 

Relevant

Focus: I'm an aircraft mechanic in the Air Force. Me and some buddies convinced these girls in Charleston that we were fighter pilots from an F-16 base near there. Fortunately we had intimate knowledge of F-16s since we worked on them daily. I think we even called each other by made up call-signs, it was like we were trying to push the boundary for how ridiculous we could act and get away with it but they just believed it more and more. Shit worked magnificently. I've never tried it since then though, never had a desire to, kind of silly looking back at it.

 

You left out the part where you ran spy games on her loins, which I hope happened, otherwise you wasted some quality deception.

 

A hipster once tried to break up a fight by yelling that he was an ex marine*. I wasn't intimately involved in the dust up so I turned around and called him out on it. He freely admitted that he was full of shit. The cop, who was obviously a former Marine and watching the fight with amusement thought the whole thing was hilarious.

I have two buddies who are identical twins and apparently the three of us look alike enough for people to ask if the three of us are brothers. None of us miss a beat and introduce ourselves as Doug, Lance, and DeWayne Fryer, from Toad Suck Arkansas. We have our half siblings- Stormy and Christy Fryer and of course our uncle Buck Fryer runs Buck Fryer's guide service down towards the Black River if you're ever needing to catch a fish or shoot something. Of course, if you need anything else, Buck can probably find that for you, too. Stormy is still on work release and Christy just had her third little one.

It just turns into a lying shit show from there. It will range from outlandish Dukes of Hazzard outlaw shit all the way to us being the golden children of the family with a heartbreaking and heartwarming story that frequently includes living in an unheated single wide trailer on the edge of a rice field. Those nights gave the three of us the strength and determination to go on to college. We don't really talk to mom much anymore after she remarried LaMont for the third time and she never did fully kick painkillers. I can keep a straight face through the whole thing. My buddies can't handle it.

*You don't have to tell me. It's former Marine, or just plain Marine.

 

More military posers!

I was in a local dive bar and was quickly approached by a Native American (read: dirty Injun, the rez here is basically a Third-world country) with a bunch of face piercings. Homie told me that he was an ex-Green Beret. Just went on and on and on about how he'd killed 30 people on the rez, and he was facing the needle, but had ended up getting to join the Rangers, and then became Special Forces after that.

Riiiight. I quickly said, "So you were a staff non-commissioned officer, right?"
"Yeah man, I got promoted fast." (This guy was in his mid-twenties - obvious bullshit)
"Well, a couple buddies of mine went through the O-course around that timeframe. When did you graduate? You might know them."

(pause while he tries to think of a good lie)

"November of 2007."

Just straight bullshit. A real Green Beret would've laughed in my face or gone "Huh?" because the O-course is just an abbreviation for "obstacle course." I called him a liar and told him to get the fuck out of my face. The bouncer ended up kicking him out after he threatened to kill me.

I don't think people realize how difficult it is to pretend to be in the military. You don't even have to go fishing for bullshit, because a poser will always say something that just makes you go "Huh?" They'll use the wrong terminology, or describe the wrong equipment, or tell a story that just wouldn't happen under any plausible circumstances. They'll inflate their ranks to sound more important than they are, they'll use implausible timeframes for training courses and deployments. There's just so much to keep track of, and all it takes is one "Huh?" to make me go "Um... I don't think you're for real."

And it's really easy to feign ignorance about something that you really know about and ask. "So you deployed to Afghanistan, huh? That's really cool. I've never deployed before; don't you have to do Mojave Viper in San Diego before you leave? I've heard that really sucks." And then he goes "Yeah, it's pretty hard" and you've gotten him, because Mojave Viper is done in 29 Palms. There's no way to catch questions like that.

In short, military posers are fucking retards.

 

One time, this pathological lying sack of shit tried to tell me something that wasn't true. The next weekend me and my buddies went out to the bar and totally convinced these poor gullible saps of something ridiculous.

I like to believe that I am successful at fooling people into believing that I am a competent human being. Mostly I'm just fooling myself, though.

 

I convinced my wife that 6" is actually 10".

 

Hell, I was in the military and sometimes when I bring something up current servicemembers give me the side-eye. I recently made a comment to some in uniform servicemembers about BDUs and they had no idea what I was talking about. So I had to ask them what the military is calling their duty uniforms nowdays and I think they're called ACUs? Hell, if I remember the conversation there was yet another uniform inbetween BDUs and ACUs as well. But I guess you can't stick with the same name, nope, new uniform new name and best of all, new acronym! That's one thing about military life I won't miss.

 

Alt-Focus

You know that philosophy about how the crazier the lie, the more convincing it is?

One of my games I like playing with people that I sense are dummies is convincing them that I personally invented yelling out HEY MOTHERFUCKER GET LAID GET FUCKED during the verses of Billy Idol's cover of "Mony Mony". And since I can keep a straight face during a nuclear holocaust, I have convinced a LOT of people that I indeed started that annoying drunk trend, despite the fact I probably would have been about 11 years old when people started doing it. Usually I'm drunk and in a bar when using the shtick, so I've come up with some pretty silly lies about it, including convincing a girl that the said profane line shouted on dancefloors at weddings translates to "mony mony" from English to Latin.

Seriously.

 

One of my coworkers was telling me that her roommate's ex bf was only the second guy the roommate had ever had sex with. He was a decent bit larger than the first, and convinced her that he was 12". She didn't have any sort of perspective or scale, just that it was "bigger" and believed him until they broke up and she told my coworker and she basically laughed in her face.

 

I was working your typical crappy college summer job when I met an extremely irritating poser who said hardly anything that wasn't a blatant, obvious lie. He was close to legally retarded, and none of his stories even approached believable.

- He was big time rapper. You just hadn't heard of him yet.
- He frequently flew out to Miami on the weekends where he would meet up with Jay-Z and smoke blunts the size of baseball bats.
- When he found out I was in college, he had to make sure I knew he was cooler than me so he told me he was attending an online music university for rapping (I'm not making this up) that cost $50k a semester. Why he needed courses in rapping perplexed me since he was already a big hit and had baller connections like Jay-Z.
- He only drank the highest shelf liquor that cost $600-$1000 per bottle. I'm pretty sure the stores in the town didn't even sell booze that expensive. Also, our job paid $9 an hour. Oh right, he funded his exquisite taste in booze through his rapping, drug dealing, and cop whooping gang banging.

And so on. For the first couple weeks us coworkers exchanged facial expressions and stares of disbelief. Is he trolling? Is he actually trying to convince us of these absurd stories? Yes, he's being 100% serious. When I finally called him out, he got all flustered and told me he didn't care what I thought.

Me: "If you don't care what I think, then why do you always make shit up?"
Him" "Fuck you. You a dumb shit."

You'd think this would be a wake up call. Nope, he continued his rambling lunacy for the rest of my time working there. The saddest part about all this was that he was thirty. I almost felt bad for him since he was really stupid, and that wasn't his fault, but he was just too annoying for me to feel guilty for mocking him about his lies.

 

I once worked with a kid who wasn't a bad guy, just kind of sad. Dad abused him ,he lived with his elderly grandparents, and didn't have much going for him otherwise. He would tell us all tall tales about the sensei of his dojo, who was teaching him martial arts. This was one bad dude - "some guys" were out to kill him, but sensei thwarted their efforts, including stopping a speeding Cadillac by cracking the engine block with one downward chop of his hand, catching arrows in mid flight, and dodging bullets. It was so pathetic we just humored him, no one had the heart to call him out.

 

Those that are prone to grandiose embellishment or outright lies I've noticed have something in common: they are children of alcoholics and/or abusers. Every last one I've met, and God how they seem to flock to me, has this in common.

One idgit refused to go downtown because the cops were after him when he beat up an officer, the same night he got shot in the leg. To prove his point he rolled up his trouser leg to show us an almost imperceptible scar the size of a rose thorn.

Another is a Tae Kwon Do master who took down 5 Guatemalans that jumped him. This is especially hilarious because this dude is about 125 pounds and Guatemalans are nature's midget koala bears that are rarely nabbed for (sober) violence. This guy also makes the punching sound effects when he tells the story. A grown man going "GOOOOGE! KAPUSH!" is one of the most pathetically awesome things ever.

The other thing in common is they all like to talk about how much ass they can get, did get, and are getting right now. The only thing more insufferable than that is when they bag an attractive idiot that believes their bullshit.

 

I've known so many pathological shitsuckers it's pathetic (of me, I suppose). Like CharlesJohnson, I seem to have a magnetic field surrounding me that attracts them. Or perhaps they simply think I'm retarded.

To spare you all of a verbose, tedious (it's typical stuff, some of which has already been mentioned) account of multiple offenders, I'll single out one that sticks out in my mind the most.

Met this kid in high school. Nice, very smart guy: liked video games, movies, heavy metal, Star Wars. We clicked on all of those fronts immediately. However, almost immediately, I smelled horseshit in the air. We were sitting at the lunch table that day, and three really cute girls walk by and he tells me he's been with all three. He started with a classic. I would later come to befriend all three, and at different points would furtively sneak (whenever the convo warranted it) in the question: "So, I know "Douchefriend." Did ya have a nice relationship?" I can assure you all I was more tactful than that, haha. Anyway, they all told me that they'd never even been out on a single date with him, that they were all just friends, and that he was "just a sweet guy."

We were both 14 when we met, but he claimed he was 15. All so he could tell myself and several others that he owned a van. Yes, you read that right: a fucking VAN. A skeevy, dippy, lameass van. I mean, if you're gonna lie about owning a vehicle, why not something cool like a fucking Corvette Stingray or a 70s Trans Am. No, a van, and his mother actually told me he didn't even have permit. Never saw any van at his house.

The top of his dung-heap-of-lies, however, was when he made claim that him and some other guys burned down a church. When I asked him where and whom the friends were that purportedly helped him do it, he fidgeted with the names and just said that they had, "moved away." And I did some homework. In all of he history of the town in which I live, there has NEVER been a church burning.

I have to say one the reasons I picked him to talk about here was that he did something that no other liar I've ever known did: he would sometimes lie for others. He would attribute things to others (that were usually of interest to me) I guess to make me jealous.

 

I think we had a pathological liar come into work yesterday. It was a younger guy, around 20, came in for his prescriptions that the doctor sent over electronically. There were three of them and as I entered them in the system, I told him his cost. I did the first one and told him his cost was $1. "But I have insurance." Yes, and that is what you pay with your insurance. He quieted down and seemed okay with it. There was a bunch of other stuff that happened, but then I went to ring him out:

Me: Okay, your total is $3.
Him: What? I have insurance! My doctor told me it would cost nothing!
Me: Well, your doctor might not know the details of your plan--
Him: Excuse me, I have SSI and they told me I pay nothing! I will SUE this place! I have 6 lawyers!

Yeah, I'm sweating the guy that can't pay $3 for his meds has 6 lawyers on retainer.

One of my coworkers volunteered to call his insurance company and while she is doing this the guy is running at the mouth, basically saying we are cheating him/overcharging him, etc.

I finally say to him that if we were going to rip him off, it wouldn't be for $1 a prescription. You can't even get a slice of pizza for $1.

So as my coworker calls him over to talk to his insurance company, he's on his cell phone. We hear him say, "Bye, mom, love you." Then he hangs up and says to us, "yeah, that was my lawyer and I WILL be calling him back." Idiot.

Incidentally, "I will SUE this place" is now a catchphrase of mine. Unfortunately, only 2 people get it and most of the time it doesn't make sense, but that doesn't seem to be stopping me.

(Our pharmacist ended up paying for the guy's prescriptions.)

 

When I was doing my internship last year, I had a guy, 31 years old, diagnosed with Asperger's when he was 13, still living with his parents, completed college in 9 years and the only job he ever had was as a substitute teacher, from which he was discharged.

As I'm doing the intake interview (with his mom by his side), he proceeds to tell he how intelligent he is, stating he has an "Asperger's adjusted IQ" of 145 (there's no such thing as an Asperger's adjusted IQ). During the course of the interview, he went on to tell me the following:
*He has hacked into the FBI mainframe, because he's a computer genius (though he was asking for the agency to pay for him to take classes for MS Office), and "there isn't a computer in the world I can't hack." He followed this up with, "Don't write that down--it might be used against me."
*He has a girlfriend in Russia to whom he is engaged and will marry once he raised enough cash to bring her to the US. When asked how they met, he said in a Russian internet chat room. "I'm fluent in Russian, German and French, all self-taught."
*He claimed to have an eidetic memory.

The whole time, his mother is sitting there beaming with pride at her accomplished prodigy, believing every word from his mouth. I asked him if he liked the show "Criminal Minds" and before he could answer, his mother replied quite gleefully, "Oh! That's his favorite show! How did you know?!"

Lucky guess. I referred him out for a psychological evaluation and we never heard from him again.