Woman 'fooled' into thinking her baby daddy was premiership footballer

shaldna

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Okay, the latest saga in the Josie Cunningham (you may wish to read the previous thread here http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=288920&highlight=josie+cunningham) story is that the person she thought was the father of her baby she also thought was a premiership footballer. Apparently she googled pics of him after their fling and was still convinced it was him.

Now, I'm not really concerned with her, but it made me wonder if, in this day and age, is it really that easy to prove or disprove someone's identity? Especially someone who is supposedly in the public eye?

How hard or easy is it to convince someone that you are or are not who you say you are? I mean, convincing someone that you have a different identity is one thing, but an identity which would be easy enough to prove with a few clicks of a mouse or a phone call? I'm just not sure.

The story has holes all over it and I'm just wondering how that innocent guy feels having his name dragged into all this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ll-City-player-Curtis-Davies-goes-labour.html
 

waylander

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How hard or easy is it to convince someone that you are or are not who you say you are? I mean, convincing someone that you have a different identity is one thing, but an identity which would be easy enough to prove with a few clicks of a mouse or a phone call? I'm just not sure.

Depends on whether you are talking about convincing a person of normal intelligence ....or Josie Cunningham
 

frimble3

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And how badly that 'someone' wants to believe. If you really believed a guy was a premiership footballer, why would you look him up?
Generally, throwing cold water on such claims and breaking 'someone's' heart is a job for best friends and/or family members. To be countered, of course, by cries of "You're just trying to make trouble!" and "You always hate everyone I bring home!"
 

shaldna

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The article mentions several times that this woman's agent mentioned that he might not be the real guy - surely her agent could, somewhere over the course of the pregnancy - have found out? It couldn't be that difficult to check out, right?
 

Wilde_at_heart

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Hopefully the poor child has someone who's relatively grounded in their life regardless; they're going to need it.
 

CassandraW

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People pull this kind of thing off all the time. "Doctors" have practiced for years, even performing surgery, before their fraud was uncovered.

Heh. Story time. I graduated from a very small law school. It was not a huge faceless institution with tons of people you would never meet. My graduating class had fewer than 200 students in it, and many seminars had fewer than a dozen students. And everyone had one required class with about 15 people in it during their first semester. If you were reasonably social and active around the school, you pretty much knew everyone at least by sight and name by the end of the first semester. Oh, and we all had a nifty facebook with pictures and a blurb about all of the students at the school, which we were all fond of perusing.

One very popular student (it turned out later he had been sleeping with three women in our class) attended classes every day and actively participated in class discussions. He bought all the books. He was in the thick of all kinds of activities. Everyone knew him. Right until the end of the first semester, no one stopped to question whether he belonged there.

But he didn't. He was a total fraud, and when he was finally caught, he disappeared. We never did know his real name, or why he decided to pose as a student for an entire semester. (Perhaps to get some action on the dating front?)

The amazing thing was, no one up to that point, not even the women who had slept with him, had bothered looking him up in the directory, or at least, questioned why he wasn't there.


ETA:

By the way, none of the three women realized that they'd been sharing him. I do not know how he managed that (I wasn't close enough to any of the women to venture to ask). I guess he did a "let's keep this down low at first" thing. In such a tiny school, it was quite difficult to keep your private life private.


ETA:

I think the moral is that we tend to trust that people are whom they say they are. You don't have to be an idiot to do that. Have you double-checked to be sure your doctor's medical degree is real? If an acquaintance tells you they graduated from a particular school, do you check? Usually, no, unless you have some reason to suspect them.

And think about how many people get involved with married people claiming to be single. It's not at all hard to check. But a lot of people don't. Come to think of it, I never have -- though I would if the guy, say, never invited me to his place or was mysteriously unavailable on his birthday and all major holidays.
 
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