THREE years ago, Taryn Wright read a Facebook post about a Canadian family who seemed to have encountered a tragic run of bad luck.

The mother, Dana Dirr, was a pregnant trauma surgeon killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. Before she died she delivered her eleventh child, Evelyn. Dana’s policeman husband J.S Dirr posted a tribute to his wife on Facebook just hours after her death, while also revealing the family’s 7-year-old son Eli Dirr was battling with terminal cancer.

“Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life,” J.S. wrote. “I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend.”

The post on the family’s Facebook page went viral. Immediately, Taryn Wright sensed something was off.

“It was too dramatic to be believed, like a rollercoaster,” Ms Wright, who is from Chicago, told news.com.au.

“I did some Googling and couldn’t find any concrete Google results about the family, other than things they had written themselves.I thought surely the death of a female surgeon who was a mother would get media coverage.”

She did a reverse Google image search on photos from the Dirr family website and discovered the images had originally been posted by South African blogger Tertia Albertyn, of her twins.

Ms Wright posted all this information on her blog, Warrior Eli Hoax, to alert people that the Dirr family might be a hoax. Within a day, she had 100,000 readers and Tertia Albertyn got in touch.

“I feel sick,” Ms. Albertyn later wrote on her own blog. “I am obviously not wildly excited that he/she stole photos of my kids but what really, really upsets me is that they played on the feelings of several thousand people by pretending to have a child with cancer.”

The family sent plastic bracelets with “Warrior Eli” emblazoned on them to supporters who requested them. A reader contacted Ms Wright with the return address label from a Warrior Eli package.

“I thought it would be a fake address, but it wasn’t. I wrote a post on my blog saying, ‘Can E in Ohio please contact me’ and she emailed me.” ‘E’ was Emily Dirr, a 23-year-old medical student. Emily had invented the Dirr family when she was a teenager.

“She and I ended up talking and she confessed the whole thing. It was just something I completely stumbled upon.”

Eventually, Emily agreed to pen an apology on Ms Wright’s blog.

“I am deeply sorry for all the pain I have caused everyone,” she wrote. “It was never my intention to do so. This all started 11 years ago when I was a bored 11-year-old kid looking for an escape from the pain and heartache I saw in my own family.

“It started almost as a fiction writing, but the more time I spent escaping to it, the more ‘real’ it became. I am so sorry it hurt so many real families, and so many people out there.”

Ms Wright claims to have exposed “40-50” people who have faked an illness online. Some have profited from their fake identities, but most do it for the attention.

“We’ve had a couple of women who shaved their heads in real life and told people they had cancer. We had one woman who pretended she was going to chemo, but it ended up that she was sitting in her car in the hospital carpark for three hours,” she said.

The 31-year-old former futures trader has two rules: she won’t write about anyone unless what they’re doing is “really egregious”, or if they’re under 18.

“Sometimes I’ll call them up and ask questions and their page, hoping it shakes them up. I email the person before I blog about them. I like to talk to them on the phone because I want my tone to come across accurately, and for them to know I’m trying to help them.

“Sometimes they’ll deny it. They’ll make up other stories. If I stick with logic and say, ‘Alright I have this picture that you’ve posted on your website, and it’s not of this person you claim it to be. It’s this other person’. I go through what I’m going to post and all of them have admitted it in the end.

“I just have a way that people trust me. I think I have a good manner with dealing with people,” she said.

Ms Wright received tip offs from her readers about wellness blogger Belle Gibson months before the young Australian woman confessed that she lied about having brain cancer.

“That one was difficult,” she says of the Belle Gibson case. “When I first read about her and saw her Instagram page [The Whole Pantry, which is also a cookbook], it didn’t come across as egregiously fake to me.

“I was surprised when it came out that she lied.”

Many speculated that Gibson has Munchausen syndrome or factitious disorder, psychological disorders where sufferers feign disease or illness to gain attention.

But Melbourne psychologist Sandy Rea says Munchausen syndrome doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not listed in the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often referred to as the “pyschiatrist’s bible”).

“There is no doubt that [Gibson] has factitious disorder imposed on the self and that comes under the umbrella of a personality disorder,” she told news.com.au.

Rea says other sufferers, like the people Ms Wright has exposed, have difficulty forming and maintaining relationships, confronting reality and being introspective.

“The reasons are most likely loneliness, untreated mental illness, perhaps depression or trauma,” she said.

Ms Wright believes the people she has exposed suffer from a mental illness.

“It’s a manifestation of depression. It’s not just someone who is a bit dramatic. I don’t think someone who is in a good place in their life wants to make 80 fake Facebook profiles.

“They all feel like their own lives aren’t worth talking about or interesting enough, so they make it interesting or go online and pretend to be someone else, because they feel more confident walking in someone else’s shoes.

She says for these people, the truth is “a contest”.

“It’s something that isn’t super set in stone for them. They approach their day differently.

“When the rest of us are just dealing with reality, they might be in the grocery store and they get bored and think ‘Wouldn’t this be a more interesting story if someone robbed the place?’ They always think how they can create a more dramatic story.”

Not everyone sees Ms Wright as a crusader of the truth. There are several blogs, includingThe Truth About Taryn Wright and Taryn Wright Is Wrong, which dispute Ms Wright’s findings.

The first post on The Truth About Taryn Wright is by a woman named Kerry, whose friend was exposed by Ms Wright. Kerry claims her friend’s life has been ruined by her ousting.

“My friend’s entire future, her career, her personal life, everything she’s worked her entire life to build, has been completely destroyed by the actions of Taryn Harper Wright,” she wrote.

“I can guarantee you that no big company will ever consider bringing my friend in for an interview.

“She was supposed to get married this coming July — that’s been cancelled now, and her fiance says he ‘needs time to sort things out’. You can figure out what that means. Her sister hasn’t spoken to her since this all happened.

“She’s been in a terrible state of depression and she’s lost all interest in life. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for the actions of Taryn Harper Wright.”

But Ms Rea believes Ms Wright’s campaign is “appropriate”, given the severity of their actions.

“The potential for them to inflict damage on other people needs to stop,” she said. “That these people feel shame doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”

But she also acknolwedges that people with factitious disorder are “absolutely at risk” of falling into a downward spiral

“These people don’t have the capacity or the support networks to cope with all the confrontational reality checks.”

While Ms Wright refutes Kerry’s claims, she says she thinks deeply about the consequences of her blog.

“It’s something that I can kind of second guess myself about. I don’t want to ruin a person’s life.

“At the end of the day, I have to be OK with what I do. If I wrote something that got millions of hits but made somebody’s life terrible, then it’s not worth it.

She is still in contact with some of the people she’s exposed.

“I’m Facebook friends with a few of them and we email or text sometimes”.

Ms Wright wants to be supportive as they transition back into reality. And, it’s an easy way to keep tabs on them.

“I want to make sure that they haven’t done something else I should know about. I want to make sure they aren’t hurting anyone else.

After exposing them as frauds online, why would these people still want to be friends with her?

“I know the REAL them, and I’m still their friend. They have created these big worlds that they’ve met people through. But they think, ‘This person knows the real me and still likes me’,” she said.

“I do think what they’ve done is terrible. I certainly don’t condone it. But I would never want my whole character to be judged by the worst thing I ever did.”

rebecca.sullivan@news.com.au