Why I Faked A Health Crisis Online

Who would pretend to have a miscarriage or cancer diagnosis? One woman confesses.

- Jennifer Wolff Perrine

“NO HEARTBEAT, NO BABY.”

Anna shared this news on BabyCenter.com on July 9, 2013. It was the latest in a series of anxious posts. The 26-year-old psychiatric nurse had written that she had become pregnant 10 weeks before her wedding, only to start bleeding three days before the marriage. An ultrasound revealed a beating heart, and the ceremony went on. Anna had posted that when she returned from the honeymoon, a checkup revealed an empty sac the first scan had missed. She had actually been carrying twins, and one twin had died. Now the other one was gone too. “It’s all over,” she wrote, and more than 30 women on the message board chimed in to offer their sympathies.

As Anna grieved, the pregnancy-loss forum became a kind of therapist’s couch. “There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about my angels,” she wrote. She solicited advice on how to honor her twins—she named them Charles and Tyler. “I want ornaments in memory of our boys,” she wrote. “I don’t want them forgotten on Christmas.”

Anna struck a chord with women on the forum, all of whom had gone through miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of an infant. “I would absolutely get your babies an ornament or a gift,” one woman wrote. “They were real live living people.”

Anna soon became pregnant again—this time, with a girl. But three days before what would have been the due date of her twins, she lost that baby too.

Online, Anna was flooded with sympathy. Offline, she had a bizarre secret: She hadn’t had any of the pregnancy losses she’d written about. In truth, she didn’t exist.