FROM a political aide accused of staging a violent attack to a bride who claimed she was snatched by a gun-wielding couple, hoaxers keep finding new ways to shock the world.
Now, experts fear these types of sick stunts and fake crimes could become more sophisticated and difficult to detect – particularly with the rise of AI, deep fakes and algorithm-driven social media.
Ex-Republican staffer Natalie Greene was found hogtied with ‘Trump w***e’ scrawled on stomach – before the case took a shocking turnCredit: justice.gov
Jennifer Wilbanks faked her own kidnapping days before her weddingCredit: Getty
Missing six-year-old boy Falcon Heene, pictured right, was feared to have floated away in a home made balloon in Colorado – but it turned out to be a hoaxCredit: Getty
Hoaxes have stunned and divided society for decades – including a family who created a frenzy when they claimed their son flew away in a balloon, and a “Runaway Bride” who made headlines in 2005 for faking a kidnapping just days before her wedding day.
And infamously, Empire star Jussie Smollett was also allegedly pretended to be the victim of a savage hate crime and posted haunting hospital photos – before he was fined and jailed.
And last week, .
Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told The Sun that hoaxes and fake crimes go viral because they play into divisive narratives.
And she explained how deeply narcissistic mindsets can driver people into this elabroate hoaxes.
While most people would question the logic behind staging a crime, a hoaxer is most likely thinking about the attention they will receive, he says.
Prof Linden, from Cambridge University, said: “People have probably been faking things since the dawn of time.
“Being a victim is a kind of social currency in modern day cultural wars. They’re competing for who’s the biggest victim in this polarised landscape.
“If someone has grandiose feelings of narcissism or someone thinks they aren’t getting enough attention – that people don’t recognise their brilliance – a hoax might be how they’re going to illustrate it.”
Greene claimed, a former Republican congressional aide, and her friend were walking on a wooded trail in a nature reserve in New Jersey when three men attacked them.
They called 911 and police hastily responded to find Greene screaming and crying with dozens of cuts on her body.
Her hands and legs were hogtied with zip ties, with political slurs written on her body with a black marker: “TRUMP W***E” was written on her stomach and “Van Drew is a racist” on her back.
But in a horrifying twist, the Department of Justice alleges Greene staged the attack and paid someone $500 to slice dozens of cuts into her body.
And the called the 911 call was placed by someone listed in arrest documents as her “co-conspirator”.
She has now been charged with conspiracy and making false statements to law enforcement in a staged political stunt.
Prof Linden said it was hard to know when hoaxing began, but people have been studying the bizarre phenomenon since the early 1980s.
But permanently scarring yourself to sell the lie, is “extreme”, even for hoaxers, he said.
Body modification tends to be linked with a need for “uniqueness”.
“People who have this need to differentiate themselves from others tend to engage in higher forms of body modification – whether that’s piercings or tattoos,” Prof Linden said.
“This need for uniqueness is related to attention seeking – you want to create a unique scenario that no-one has gone through.”
If you fabricate a lie so big nobody is going to question it because it seems too outlandish for people to think you made it up
Prof Linden
In the Greene case, Prof Linden said the “good degree of premeditation” by her and her co-conspirator likely meant they wanted the alleged story to go viral.
He said: “Why would you go to these great lengths to cut yourself if there wasn’t a payoff at the end?”
“If someone intentionally plays into a culture war theme, writes very polarising slogans on themselves… they meant for this to go viral.
“They know the media has a negativity bias and reports on these cultural issues and they know a dramatic event will get attention.”
Greene’s case started to unravel when police noticed inconsistencies with her and her friend who was with her when she was attacked.
Her co-conspirator googled “zip ties near me” prior to the attack, which the DOJ matched to ones found in Greene’s Maserati parked at the scene.
Ex-Republican staffer Natalie Greene is at the centre of a staged political stuntCredit: Facebook
Police discovered Greene hogtied in the Egg Harbor Township Nature ReserveCredit: justice.gov
‘Trump w****’ was scrawled across her stomachCredit: justice.gov
Prof Linden said it was “pretty neglectful” that Greene and her conspirator left evidence of their hoax in Greene’s car.
He added: “Maybe they thought people wouldn’t believe them because she had cuts on their face – why would they lie?”
Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is often attributed to the idea that no one will question a lie if it’s big enough.
Being a victim is a kind of social currency in modern day cultural wars. They’re competing for who’s the biggest victim in this polarised landscape
Prof Linden
“If you fabricate a lie so big nobody is going to question it because it seems too outlandish for people to think you made it up,” Prof Linden said.
“Maybe Greene was thinking about that, ‘who in their right mind would think I harmed myself because it’s so ridiculous to question? They will accept me at my word’.”
And having a co-conspirator probably helped to normalise and validate the hoax, Prof Linden said.
He added: “It gives some extra sense of ‘I’m not that crazy because there’s other people who are helping me do this’.”
Horrific photos in court documents show Greene with deep, grisly cuts on her body and faceCredit: justice.gov
Greene allegedly paid a fetish artist to mutilate her body in a sick stuntCredit: justice.gov
‘Competing to be a victim’
The seed of the hoax idea could spring from the thought that not enough is being done about a particular problem.
Prof Linden said: “You think, strategically you’re going to contribute to the goals of a movement by faking a crime with the intention of having police and other members of society crack down on an extremist organisation.
“It’s hard to know if they’re doing it just for the attention or if they have strategic intentions because it will be good for their career, tie them stronger to their movement and maybe they have personality traits that predispose them to act like this.”
Pretending to be a victim can be a mechanism for attention for oneself and their cause, he added.
And, expecting to get world wide media attention, hoaxers are furthering the agenda of their cause in a bid to become a more prominent member of their movement.
“One way to bond with a larger movement is through a sacrifice,” he said.
“If you have literal scars from being attacked – by the left in Greene’s case – that is going to increase your bond and status with the conservative movement.”
‘Machiavellian’ traits
While Prof Linden is not a forensic or clinical psychologist, he understands anti-personality disorders can lead people to seek attention or manipulate social situations.
Exhibiting Machiavellian traits such as manipulation, deceit and narcissism could also explain the psychology behind a hoaxer.
And they might think they can talk their way out of anything.
People who have grandiosity illusions, they do think they’re better than everyone else and they’re overconfident
Prof Linden
“People who have grandiosity illusions, they do think they’re better than everyone else and they’re overconfident,” he said.
“People who engage in a lot of interpersonal manipulation think they can control the situation- they can talk their way out of anything.
“[They think] they’re an upstanding citizen, so nobody is going to suspect them.”
Jussie Smollett in hospital after the attackCredit: Twitter
Smollett cried as he was interviewed by Good Morning America following the alleged attack
In 2019, the sent shockwaves around the world after he was the victim of a sickening hate crime.
Coming at a time of racially-charged tensions and claims of police corruption in Chicago, sympathetic messages of support for the actor flooded in from celebrities and even President .
Smollett had gone out in freezing temperatures in the middle of the night to get some food when he claimed he was attacked by two white men on Chicago’s East Lower North Water Street.
His friend called 911 after Smollett returned to his apartment with a noose still around his neck – also saying he had been punched in the face and had a substance poured on him.
But while the case captured the world’s attention – police then revealed the whole thing was staged, including a threatening racist letter they claimed Smollett since himself.
Smollett – who has always denied he faked the attack – allegedly paid two extras from the Empire show $3,500 (£2,600) to stage the attack.
Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail – but the court later ordered the case be dismissed on the grounds of due process, but .
While almost all hate crimes are real, a tiny fraction have been exposed as attempts to fool both sides of the culture and political divide.
And a handful of faked hate crimes in the 80s and 90s sparked scholars to study the strange phenomena.
The 1998 book by US academic Katheryn Russell-Brown documented 67 racial hoaxes, finding the “majority of perpetrators were someone white falsely accusing someone black”.
Runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, left, leaves court with her attorney, Lydia Sartain, in 2005. Wilbanks pleaded no contest to a felony chargeCredit: AP:Associated Press
Runaway Bride
In an extreme case of cold feet, Jennifer Wilbanks vanished before her wedding in the US, and a nationwide manhunt was launched to try find the beautiful bride-to-be.
Her distraught family appeared on TV, begging for her safe return and her story was reported on across the America.
Jennifer was found three days later in New Mexico, claiming she had escaped capture by a Latino man and Caucasian woman who snatched her while she was out on a run.
She said she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by the gun-wielding couple in what turned out to be a bizarre hoax.
Initially, she graphically described a sexual assault by her captors to police, first by the female abductor and then by the male
But she later recanted the harrowing account, admitting she had fled Georgia on her own accord, taking a cross-country bus trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico to avoid her lavish 600-guest wedding.
The case garnered international headlines, and Wilbanks was dubbed as “The Runaway Bride”.
‘Balloon boy’
One of the most famous hoaxes came in 2009, when chase to locate their missing six-year-old son.
Richard Heene frantically calling emergency services to plead them to save his son’s life, claiming he had floated away in a backyard science project.
On October 15 2009, young Falcon crawled into his father’s science experiment- a silver helium-filled balloon- and which then accidentally floated away in fast winds, his father claimed.
Flying high in the sky for two hours, a news crew in a helicopter dramatically chased the balloon- the broadcast going world wide
When it landed, there was no trace of Falcon.
He was eventually discovered in the attic space of the garage but it wasn’t until a live interview on that people turned on the family.
Young Falcon said his parents told him he had to hide for “the show”.
Missing six-year-old boy Falcon Heene was feared to have floated away in a home made balloon in Colorado in 2009, it tuned out to be a hoaxCredit: Balloon Boy
Falcon was eventually discovered emerging from his garage’s atticCredit: Splash News
While his father says the six-year-old misunderstood the question, it was enough to make everyone believe the whole thing was a stunt, staged for media attention.
It was later learned that the family had participated on a reality TV show, suggesting they were keen on media attention.
Criminal charges were brought for conspiracy, contributing to delinquency of a minor, false reporting to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant.
Mistrust and polarisation
Media hoaxes, particularly ones with political motivations, often end up undermining the cause they were originally invented to magnify.
“It tends to backfire because people tend to wonder if other [incidents] could be fabricated too,” Prof Linden said.
“It’s not a very good strategy.”
With the current political climate a tinder box, acts like Greene’s and Smollett’s end up exacerbating polarisation, rather than cooling things down.
Particularly in the US, Prof Linden thinks these hoax just end up increase antagonism between the left and right.
“I think it’s risky to try create fake hoaxes to gain victim status for one side so that you can smear the other side with a false crime,” Prof Linden said.
These events tear at the fabric of social relations at a very heated political time
Prof Linden
And with people more than ever sharing things online that haven’t been verified as accurate or true, hoaxers don’t even need people to believe their lies to get to the top of the news headlines, Prof Linden said.
Social media helps these fake narratives spread in “unprecedented ways”, exposing millions of people to stories they wouldn’t otherwise have seen- often with little context, he said.
Algorithms tend to priorities more shocking, extremist, negative, emotional context, which these hoaxes play into to go viral.
People share things on social media without really believing it and online influencers may interpret events and creating conspiracy theories around them which means these stories become harder to verify.
“Of course it can happen on either side [of the political spectrum] but the problem is it creates mistrust and polarisation,” Prof Linden said.
“One of the main pillars of democracy is debate.
“People can have informed debate and get along, but these events tear at the fabric of social relations at a very heated political time.”
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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