After Taryn Wright exposed an elaborate fake tragedy on Facebook, she found herself leading a squad of online detectives – but on the internet, it doesn’t take long for a crowd to become a mob

On 13 May 2012, friends of Dana Dirr, a 35-year-old surgeon in Saskatchewan, were greeted with a distressing message when they logged into Facebook: “URGENT PRAYERS NEEDED.” A post written by Dirr’s father informed her friends that Dana was fighting for her life after a head-on car accident. Dana had been airlifted to the very same trauma centre where she worked as a surgeon; in fact, she was meant to be on duty that night. “Dana is almost 35 weeks pregnant now,” her father wrote. “So please pray for her and the baby!”

Within hours, hundreds of people had shared the post of Dana’s accident, and hundreds more had left supportive comments. As she fought for her life, her family continued to post updates to Facebook. Minutely detailing their lives online was nothing new for the Dirrs. Dana’s husband, a tattooed ex-punk named JS, had been active in online communities for at least a decade – and had acquired hundreds of online-only friends (and at least one online lover). In 2010, Dana and JS had even become minor internet celebrities when they began sharing the story of their seven-year-old son Eli, who was in the midst of his fourth battle with cancer, with a growing number of followers – first a few hundred, then a few thousand. They called him Warrior Eli.

Cancer cons, phoney accidents and fake deaths: meet the internet hoax buster Read more

Friends of the Dirrs returned to their Facebook page for the rest of the day in search of new updates. Late that night, JS announced that baby Evelyn was delivered healthy at 11.11pm; shortly afterwards, at 12.02am, Dana died. Her husband saw this timing as Dana’s final act of courage: “She wouldn’t have wanted Evie’s birthday to be overshadowed by her death every year,” he wrote. “She waited until just two minutes after midnight on Mother’s Day to leave us.”

The family’s friends and followers asked about setting up a crowdfunding campaign to provide financial support during this time of trouble, but JS demurred. The Canadian healthcare system would be footing the bills, he said. Instead, the family asked for donations to be made to Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a childhood cancer charity.

Those who had got to know the Dirrs online mourned Dana’s death. “I spent my night before Mother’s Day in tears and every time I told my story yesterday I was in tears on Mothers Day!!” one Facebook friend wrote later – she also donated $50 to Alex’s Lemonade Stand.

In a cosy house in the southern suburbs of Chicago, Taryn Wright watched the dramatic saga of Dana Dirr’s death unfold online in real time. Wright was in her early 30s and was living with her parents at the time, practically immobile after major hip surgery. She dealt with the depressing lack of autonomy and mobility as best she could – mostly by knitting and “doing paint-by-numbers like a serial killer”.

When Wright stumbled upon the ostentatiously tragic story of Dana Dirr, she quickly came to feel that something did not add up. Dana’s dramatic death and the birth of her baby – on Mother’s Day, no less – was not being reported anywhere in the media. And the more Wright looked into it, the more the entire Dirr family saga, chronicled in a decade’s-worth of blogposts, MySpace pages, and online photo albums, did not ring true, either. There were too many kids, and too many of them were twins. There were murders and mistaken identities and dramatic ironies. It all sounded suspiciously like a soap opera.

Wright took a few of the hundreds of family photos that the Dirrs had posted online and plugged them into a reverse image search, which allows users to see where else an image has appeared on the internet. She found that the photographs had been lifted from a South African blogger. What’s more, Dana Dirr was supposedly a trauma surgeon, but there was no profile for her on a hospital’s website, or any search result that had not been written by one of the Dirrs themselves.

Wright felt increasingly certain that Dana Dirr did not exist. The discovery both incensed and invigorated her. Her first instinct was to tell all the people whose photos had been stolen about the hoax. But instead of emailing each one of them, she decided to create a blog to announce her suspicions. She called it Warrior Eli Hoax Group.

A link made the rounds on Facebook, and within hours a group of like-minded sceptics began gravitating to the blog, posting their own findings in the comments section. Some had been Facebook friends with the Dirrs and were shocked to find they had been duped; some were caregivers who were active in the childhood cancer community, outraged by the deception; and others, like Wright, had no personal connection but were drawn to the oddness of the whole situation.

After having figured out that Dana Dirr probably did not exist, Wright started looking into Dirr’s Facebook friends. “When I Googled their names, nothing came up,” she recalled. “And when I started looking up their photos, I found that they had been stolen, too.” Not only did Dana Dirr not exist, Wright determined, but neither did her husband or her sick son. More than 70 of the Dirrs’s Facebook friends were fake, too.

Wright, a dark-haired woman with precisely arched eyebrows, has long been drawn to stories of serial killers, serial liars, and cult leaders. (A few years ago, she and her sister pledged to stop bringing up the Jonestown mass suicide on first dates.) She had obsessively followed the twisted stories of several women who had been caught creating elaborate fake personas online in the early days of the internet. There was Kaycee Nicole, a teenager dying of leukaemia who turned out to be a healthy middle-aged woman. And Jesse Jubilee James, a cowboy-fireman-poet with suicidal tendencies and liver cancer, who was actually the creation of a woman in her mid-50s. Now Wright found herself in the heady position of being the detective, uncovering a hoax of her own.

“At the beginning, it felt like a giant puzzle to solve,” Wright said. She also started a Facebook group to facilitate the investigation; in the span of an hour, a hundred people joined to help her sift through online clues. Unnerved and exhilarated, Wright closed the group to new members. She stayed up all night, drinking Diet Coke and refreshing the site to check for new comments as the puzzle pieces came together. In less than a day, her makeshift blog got 100,000 hits. It was the first hint that what Wright had started might get beyond her control.

* * *

In 1951, the British endocrinologist Richard Asher identified a class of patients who presented dramatic symptoms and told fantastic stories of illness and woe. When credulity and sympathy began to wear thin in one town, they simply moved down the road and began again with a new set of doctors, nurses and neighbours. Asher called this illness Munchausen syndrome.

Munchausen patients pose a problem for clinicians, in that their sickness involves pretending to be sick. Sometimes that pretending blurs the line between “real” and “fake” illness: Munchausen patients have been known to bleed themselves in order to appear anaemic, or to dose themselves with chemotherapy drugs they don’t need.

Several years ago, after noticing an increase in similar behaviour online, Dr Marc Feldman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama, coined the term “Munchausen by internet” to describe people who spread accounts of fake illness online. “For most of these deceivers, sympathy and attention is the main thing,” Feldman told me. “They get nurturance they feel unable to get in any other way. They may have poor social skills or poor coping strategies, and pretending to be ill allows them to manifest this instant and caring community.

“Before the advent of the internet, people would have to read medical textbooks or go to medical libraries to learn about esoteric ailments,” said Feldman. “They had to practise their pain faces in the mirror, then go to the ER and enact a painful crisis of some sort for the staff. Now you can go to Wikipedia and become an expert on an ailment in 20 minutes. Then you go online and instantly find a supportive community.”

When people from that supportive community realise that their sympathy (and sometimes money) has been extracted under false pretences, they may, like victims of financial fraud, feel too ashamed to talk about it. Others – such as those who flocked to the Warrior Eli Hoax blog – take it one step further, turning their embarrassment into revenge, becoming online vigilantes.

In May 2012, Wright wrote dozens of blogposts about the Dirrs. She traced a photo of Dana Dirr’s pregnant belly back to a New York mother, and tracked down 10-year-old blogposts about the tragic murder of JS’s (fictional) twin. As the updates rolled in, the site’s audience kept growing. Wright found herself in the centre of an odd, passionate group of amateur online detectives. Her hundred-strong Warrior Eli Hoax Facebook group made researching the Dirr case easier. One person would share expertise on a rare form of childhood cancer, while another would turn out to know about tracking down IP addresses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The donation page for the fictitious Dana Dirr posted by a hoaxer on a cancer charirty website. Photograph: Picasa/Warrior Eli Hoax Group

It did not take long for the group to figure out who was behind the Dirr drama. Several of the family’s supporters had received packages of plastic bracelets with a message of support for Warrior Eli. The packages had been sent and paid for by JS’s sister, Emily. Unlike the other Dirr family members, Emily Dirr did have an online presence; she was a medical student in Ohio. Wright was convinced that she had enough information to publicly out Emily, but she wanted to speak to the hoaxer first. In a phone conversation that Wright recalls as “surreal,” Emily admitted in a quiet monotone that she had created the whole saga. The story, which she had begun in 2004, was a way to keep herself entertained, like fan fiction about a group of characters of her own invention.

“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,” Emily Dirr wrote in a public apology posted on Wright’s website. “It started almost as 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.”

Hearing this, some group members were out for blood. They wanted the young woman prosecuted – for fraud, for impersonating someone else, for whatever they could get her for.

One of the loudest and angriest voices in the Warrior Eli Hoax group was an odd character named Father James Puryear. According to Puryear’s Facebook profile, he was a 16-year-old single father who hoped to become a preacher. He was the one who found the Dirrs’ old Photobucket account, which had turned out to be an important clue. He also professed to be shocked and horrified that anyone would pretend to be someone else online. But in the group’s first week, when members started introducing themselves, “he posted this long, insane thing”, Wright recalls. “‘I was raped when I was this age. Then I had a kidnapping, and then my twin did this.’ Just like every kind of red flag.” Her suspicions aroused, Wright asked for photos of Puryear’s two kids. Puryear sent a photo of a kid wearing a Halloween mask. Wright said she did not believe the photographs were real and Puryear did not send any more. Wright booted Puryear out of the group. Barely two weeks later, Father James Puryear – who turned out to be a 24-year-old Massachusetts woman named Carissa Hads – was arrested in West Virginia. Hads later pleaded guilty to posing as Puryear in order to have sex with a 15-year-old girl she had been talking to over the internet for more than a year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carissa Hads posed as a man to groom a 15-year-old girl. Photograph: Warrior Eli Hoax Group

After that, Wright made sure to verify group member’s real identities. But the idealism of those first few weeks was shattered. “It made me think about, like, who are these people that I’m sharing stuff with in here? Because it felt great at first – we were all great friends,” Wright says, and sighs. “I’m too trusting.”

* * *

For some people, cancer has acquired a strange allure. In John Green’s blockbuster young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, tragic, beautiful young people with terminal diagnoses are alternately funny and profound as they face their fates. Online, some cancer victims have even become celebrities. Since the early days of the internet, patients and their families have shared their stories online as a way to cope with the isolating effects of illness. There are hundreds of these pages on the internet, most of them genuine, the great majority on Facebook – Prayers for Shane, Hope for Hannah, Rally for Rowan. Many of these groups originated as a way to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues, but it does not take long for strangers to start tuning in, too. The most popular cancer blogs have tens of thousands of followers. They fundraise by selling T-shirts and bumper stickers, and their stories sometimes become famous enough to merit articles in mainstream magazines.

This attention has inspired people eager for the privileged status of the sick – the sympathy, if not the suffering, of real cancer patients and their “courageous battles”. “The heroic image that cancer survivors increasingly have is attractive to factitious disorder patients,” Marc Feldman writes in his scholarly book Playing Sick.

In September 2012, Taylor Swift wrote a song dedicated to Ronan Thompson, a three-year-old boy who died of neuroblastoma, featuring lyrics taken from Ronan’s mother’s popular blog. After Swift’s song was released on iTunes, dozens of blogs by mothers with dying children started popping up – many of them actually written by Swift-obsessed high-school students hoping to get their idol’s attention with a tragic story of their own. (The Warrior Eli Hoax team investigated many of these blogs, though they generally did not publicly post information about teenage hoaxers.)

By the summer of 2012, Wright’s inbox was filling up with emails reporting potential hoaxers. She shared the details with the Facebook group, which began investigating them as well. Diana Almanza, a stay-at-home mother in North Carolina, joined the group because she wanted to see how the Emily Dirr story turned out. “When someone sends you something that they think is fake, it’s very hard not to do something,” she told me. “You can’t look away. It gets under your skin, I guess.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In John Greens’ novel The Fault in Our Stars, ‘tragic, beautiful young people dying of cancer are alternately funny and profound as they face their fates’. Photograph: Allstar/20TH Century Fox

As the months ticked by, the hundred-odd members of the Warrior Eli Hoax group honed their detective skills. They investigated a part-time rodeo rider with leukaemia; a terminally ill 21-year-old; and an amnesiac teenager undergoing “extreme chemotherapy”; each one was exposed as a fake. Some hoaxers hid behind made-up names and stolen photos; others posted under their own names and seemed to be faking cancer in real life, too.

Some of the hoaxes were pathetic – the woman who posed as a dying (male) soccer player online stole photos of David Beckham for her fake Facebook profile – but others were extensive and elaborate. Hoaxers shaved their heads and bought medical equipment on the internet to make their hospital selfies look more realistic. Many of these hoaxers were fooling lots of people. One had even been voted “patient of the year” by the US Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, another had used crowdfunding websites to raise thousands of dollars.

The detectives had learned to spot telltale signs – alleged cancer patients who were bald, but still had their eyebrow hair; sick people supposedly on steroids who didn’t have the typical puffy-faced appearance. Exposing a hoaxer sometimes took more than 100 hours of research, poring over potential fakers’ Facebook pages and trying to connect a name with an IP address. “We always want to be 1,000% sure,” said Almanza.

* * *

In January 2013, Taryn Wright invited a few dozen friends and family over to her house for a party. The occasion was an episode of the American news programme 20/20 about online hoaxers that featured the Dirr case and an interview with Wright, her first appearance on TV. Wright was relieved after watching the segment with her interview; it seemed to go well. Then the programme showed something Wright had not expected – hidden camera footage of hoaxer Emily Dirr walking down the street. She looked frumpy and exhausted, about as far as you could get from JS Dirr, her swaggering online alter ego, with his tattoos and twins and many lovers. Wright’s friends and relatives laughed and pointed.

Wright felt sick. “She was just walking down the street eating a candy bar.” Wright says. “And everybody is laughing, saying, ‘Look at her, she looks like a troll. She’s probably always eating a candy bar.’ But I’m thinking, She probably worked hard to get the pieces of her life together and all of a sudden she’s on Channel 7 on a Friday night, and everyone is laughing at her. What if it had been me? That would be horrible.”

After the show aired, Wright became increasingly uncomfortable about the responsibility she was taking on by inserting herself into people’s lives. That autumn, the group researched a young woman whose Tumblr detailed her long battle with cancer – and who was collecting money with a GoFundMe page. Her stories turned out to have been largely stolen from a legitimate cancer blogger. The group had figured out the name of the person behind the hoax and its members were close to building a convincing case against her when the woman announced on her Tumblr that she was going to kill herself.

The more Wright chatted with hoaxers, the more she felt convinced that they were suffering from mental illness

From her research, Wright knew that the woman lived in Florida with her brother. When she started announcing concrete, specific plans, Wright decided she had to call the police. “Hi, I’m Taryn, and I live in Chicago,” she told the police dispatcher, unsure whether they would dismiss her as some kook from the internet. She was pleased when they took her report seriously. After the holidays, Wright contacted the woman’s brother to check up on her. He said that she had been taken in for treatment on Christmas Eve; to Wright, this felt like a victory. (Since then, she has reported at least three other possibly suicidal hoaxers to police.)

Wright also spent hours talking to hoax victims. “I’d out people, and then I’d feel responsible. I wanted to make sure everyone was OK. I didn’t feel like I could ignore emails from people who were angry or grieving. So I ended up talking on the phone a bunch after each case,” she says. She even formed phone friendships with some of the hoaxers themselves, including a young woman in California named Jadzia, who had faked several pregnancies and one bout of cancer.

The more time Wright spent chatting with hoaxers, the more she felt convinced that they were suffering from mental illness. “If someone is looking at their own life and thinking, ‘I would rather write about living the life of somebody who’s dying,’ something’s going on there. I don’t think that they’re well. I don’t think that a happy person goes and does this,” Wright says. She learned to recognise the typical hoaxer profile: a socially isolated woman in her early 20s, often “a little chunky”, sometimes depressed. Wright, who has had her own struggles with weight and depression, saw a more desperate version of herself in some of these women.

Because Wright is the public face of the hoax-exposing world, many people friended her on Facebook – including hoax victims, fellow detectives, and sometimes even the hoaxers themselves. Having all those people together in the same virtual room got contentious at times. “Jadzia will like a photo I posted, and then other people will question me about it – ‘Is that the Jadzia you wrote about on your blog?’ And it’s just like, ‘Yeah, you know, we’re friends,’” Wright says. “They’ve done bad things, but I have a lot of friends who’ve done bad things, and it’s not like I’m going to walk away from them. I guess it’s a little weird because I’ve met them because they did bad things. But the way I see it, that’s only one side of it.”

* * *

I met Wright last summer at her parents’ house in the southern suburbs of Chicago. That day, she was looking into a woman who posted online as Diabetic Gymnast, and who had suffered an improbable number of tragedies – multiple cancers, an abusive stepfather, rape, a rare blood disease – in her 20-year-life. Wright skimmed the Diabetic Gymnast’s stories of blood test results and suicide attempts with narrowed eyes. Something in her seemed to quicken when she turned up a potential clue: a reference to a specific hospital, a photograph that didn’t look quite right.

Wright is sharp and self-deprecating, two qualities that come across strongly in her internet writing. She is also obsessive, with a precise recall for all the minute details of the cases she has worked on. Listening to her, I sometimes found myself lost amid all the overblown and oddly repetitive drama: “Wait, whose twin was that? Was the adoption real or fake?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taryn Wright on the front steps of her home in Homewood, Illinois. Photograph: Max Herman/Demotix

People drawn to online sleuthing are a particular bunch, by turns noble and self-righteous, obsessed with justice and occasionally fanatical. Their interest in tragedies that do not directly relate to their lives – at least until they put themselves in the middle of them – can sometimes seem propelled by empathy, and other times by prurience. Inevitably, such online communities often hit by their own little cyclones of infighting and drama.

But for its first year of existence, it seemed as though the Warrior Eli Hoax group was different. After the strange incident with Father James Puryear/Carissa Hads, there were no fights or scandals. Wright did not even have to moderate the comments. But over time, that began to change. The tone of the comments became angrier: “I want to punch her in the throat,” one group member wrote about a hoaxer. “I have nothing but contempt and disgust for her as a human being,” wrote another. (Both of those commenters had lost close family members to cancer, Wright points out.)

Wright started hearing from people who were mentioned on the blog – not just the hoaxers, but their friends or family members, people who were only tangential characters in one of the cases. It turned out that her blog’s readers were contacting them via Facebook, sometimes angrily and other times just out of curiosity. “People feel like they are entitled to the true story behind things, and don’t see these stories as involving real people,” said Wright. “It’s like everybody is the TV journalist who comes in with a camera and says, ‘How do you feel about your kid getting hit by a car?’”

Around the same time, things began deteriorating among the core group of detectives in the Warrior Eli Hoax Facebook group. If Wright voiced sympathy for a hoaxer, other group members would post dozens of incensed replies. “There was more and more of the ‘Let’s lynch her’ mentality [when the group identified a hoaxer]. I began to feel weird about posting personal stuff about other people in the big group because I wanted to make sure that the people who were helping investigate were on the same page that I was: that we were doing an educational thing, trying to help people get better – not a vengeance thing,” she said.

Talking about the unravelling of the Facebook group is clearly painful for Wright. She considered many of her fellow detectives to be friends. Most of them, she insisted, are good people. “I understand why they got upset. They saw their own child go through leukaemia, and lose their hair, and die. So for them, somebody faking that and taking a child’s pictures who died of cancer and saying that this is their child, that hits them in a different way than it hits me. So I don’t feel like I could tell them, ‘Don’t feel like this,’” she said. “At the same time, I don’t want to feel like that.”

* * *

The kindness of strangers has helped families pay for treatment, raised money for research and provided support in dark times. But, through her hoax-exposing work, Wright has also seen how the online cancer community can sometimes become vicious. As Wright became increasingly well-known online, she began to receive messages asking her to investigate parents. Many of these emails mentioned one woman in particular, who frequently posted on charity websites requesting video games for her special needs son, Jayden.“I got emails about her, maybe 10 a day, saying look into this, look into that,” Wright recalled.

Wright has herself become a target for abuse. One day last year, she received an unexpected and unwelcome piece of mail

But the problem was that Jayden’s mother was not a hoaxer. “Their concern wasn’t the legitimacy,” said Wright. Instead, Jayden’s mother’s critics accused her of asking for too many video games, and she had responded to their snide comments by lashing out. Such tantrums are deviant behaviour in a community that is all about gratitude, heart emojis and inspirational quotations about hope.

The conflict unsettled Wright. The community simply seemed not to like Jayden’s mother and had turned on her. “If the parent doesn’t mind their Ps and Qs 100%, or is kind of a hillbilly and gets into screaming matches online, they’ll start Facebook groups like, Ban Hope for Jayden,” explained Wright. “Or they’ll Google this woman and find out she’d been arrested in the 90s for something, and anytime she posts an update on her legitimately sick child, somebody will link to the arrest report from back to 1991. It’s crazy.”

Wright has herself become a target for abuse. In April 2013, she received an unexpected and unwelcome piece of mail: a certified letter from a lawyer threatening a lawsuit for defamation for her posts about a cancer faker named Chelsea Hassinger. But when she took a closer look, something about the letter seemed off. It looked as though it had been printed out on a regular piece of computer paper. “It wasn’t, like, attorney paper,” she says. She Googled the name of the law firm and got no hits. But when she called the phone number listed on the letterhead, the voicemail informed her that she had reached the law firm of Gorman and Rickman. If it was a trick or a scam, it was certainly an elaborate one.

The more Wright looked into it, the more she was convinced it was fake. Still, she was spooked. The person behind it clearly wanted her to feel intimidated – and they knew her home address. Not long after, Wright discovered the blogs: The Truth About Taryn Wright, Taryn Wright Is Wrong, among others. Whoever was behind these blogs had included unflattering photos from Wright’s deleted weight loss blog and private information about her sister. The vengeful blogger even sent Facebook messages to all of Wright’s friends, accusing her of being a liar.

The campaign of harassment lasted about four months before petering out. Wright says that the same person – a hoaxer’s angry friend – was behind the blogs and the fake lawyer’s letter but declines to say more for fear of inspiring more antagonism. But the experience clearly rattled her. “I knew that there would be stuff that came out about me, and I was willing to take that risk,” she says. “But don’t post stuff about my sisters. Don’t post stuff about people who I care about.”

As she dealt with the cancer community’s Mean Girl clique – the vengeance-seeking detectives, her online stalker, the distraught hoax victims calling her up at all hours – hoax-hunting was all starting to feel so much more messy than it had at the start. As she told me these stories, I imagined the hoaxers and the hoax-hunters both online late at night, the blue light of their computer screens casting an eerie glow on their faces as they immersed themselves in lives that were not their own.

In June 2013, Wright removed everyone from the Warrior Eli Facebook group except for four other people, including Diana Almanza. The remaining members are all dedicated posters with solid research skills, and, most importantly, they are all in agreement about how to handle hoaxers. These days, the group generally opts to research and resolve a case without posting it to the blog. Only particularly egregious hoaxes make it to the blog.

“We don’t want [hoaxers] villainised,” says Almanza. “They have a mental illness. They certainly do bad things, and there are times you research and you get really angry with them. But, my hope for all them is that, by being exposed and helping to get them treatment, they can move on and have happier, more productive lives.”

Wright has not worked full-time since the blog took off. She has applied for plenty of jobs, but whenever she gets close there is a moment when her prospective boss gets a pained look and says something like, “So, we Googled you …”

I asked Wright if she ever regrets her impulsive decision to start the blog that day in May, 2012. “I don’t know,” she said, after a long pause. “I’m proud of what I did. I think that I went into it with good intentions. I think that I have continued with good intentions. I’ve met some great people, people that will be my friends for ever.” But at the same time, her own experiences of harassment have made her empathise with the hoaxers she has exposed. “[The harassment] felt like such a violation to me – how does it feel like to the people I write about? A lot of people have told me that it’s a totally different thing, because I’m not doing anything wrong. But at the same time, it’s the same feeling. And I don’t like the feeling.”

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