38 ms·
I tracked down my impostor
- matt-attack 6y agoWhat an incredibly odd story. I wonder if the man suffered from mental illness.
- jmercouris 6y agoI am very certain he did, whether we have a name for it or not.
- cbanek 6y agoWhile you're probably right, I always find it oddly weird sometimes how logical these things can be. Like copying tattoos and mannerisms. On one hand, it doesn't make sense to pretend to be someone else, but if you look past that, the steps were frighteningly logical. And this is where I think it dovetails into other scams. I'm not sure if the scammer is above it, a part of it, or unaware of it sometimes, but what they present and what you see isn't really the whole story.
- jshmrsn 6y agoActually, I’m confused by the logic of that. If you were plagiarizing someone, wouldn’t you want to be look different from the original author so you don’t remind people of them and get caught? His hand tattoos meant that anyone who know the original author and encountered the copycat would immediately be suspicious even if they weren’t familiar with the subject matter.
- ironmagma 6y agoBut the only definition we have for mental illness is whether your situation falls under some category that we have a name for. It’s a slippery (and fuzzy) enough slope having designations for illnesses that encompass a huge portion of the human condition (see Rosenhan). Much worse if we also include things that don’t have entries in the DSM. It would be trivial enough to say that anyone you have even mild distaste for has a mental illness.
- Sebb767 6y ago> But the only definition we have for mental illness is whether your situation falls under some category that we have a name for. The one I heard was a variation of "does the person suffer due to the condition or cause harm to other people". That was a side course in university. I actually like that one a lot, since there's really not a clear line between an illness and just being different.
- ironmagma 6y agoIt also doesn’t make a meaningful distinction from non-mental illness though, like chronic pain or even poverty.
- getlawgdon 6y agoThat doesn't make sense. Define harm. Carelessness can cause injury and isn't mental illness, etc.
- lazyasciiart 6y agoEven DSM-IV had "otherwise unspecified mental disorder" as a diagnosis. https://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596.dsm20 https://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.books.9780...
- mannykannot 6y agoWe don't have to go down that slippery slope. It is not plausible that the specific issue here is something that encompasses a huge portion of the human condition. Alternatively, if it is a manifestation of something that is, but at a much lower level than with this individual, there are prominent things in the DSM for which this is also the case.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kfoley 6y agoReminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddit user didn't really fit that profile. Plus,it seems like r/emacs would be a really poor choice for that. I've always been curious to know why someone would do something like this. It's interesting to read about it happening on a way larger scale.
- brendoelfrendo 6y agoIt's almost always bot accounts. Reddit is decent at catching bots so the botters copy legitimate comments, build a post history, and then switch to scamming or spamming after the account has some credibility.
- duxup 6y ago>Reddit is decent at catching bots I don't know about that so much. I'm seeing a lot more straight up spam on reddit that looks easy to spot, but I think reddit gave up or something...
- brendoelfrendo 6y agoTotally possible. Maybe enough people figured out how to game their detection so they gave up, or if it was so gameable in the first place it was never as good as I'm remembering.
- FDSGSG 6y ago>Reddit is decent at catching bots I don't think you've tried to bot reddit.
- luckylion 6y agoDid it make sense in the thread on reddit? There are a couple of bots (I hope) on Stack Overflow that re-post answers to other questions that are vaguely related based on keywords or tags. They usually didn't make sense in the question context, but were upvoted by people for some reason.
- wunderflix 6y agoWhat a crazy story. Reminds me of the movie “Following” by Christopher Nolan. Similarly, a weird person who is stalking people. Worth a watch...
- oh_sigh 6y agoIs there any verification of this story? The way it ends with "As told to Amy Sedghi" makes me think this is some spoken word story rather than some journalistic recounting of events.
- ectopod 6y agoIt just means that Amy Sedghi interviewed him, and then wrote it from a first person pov. It's not unusual.
- ketamine__ 6y agoWhy aren't there any pictures of this imposter? Surely respecting his privacy isn't warranted since he's public with his imposter persona. Not surprised I'm getting downvoted by people that support abusers.
- uniqueid 6y agoThe claim is unusual. My guess is this article (or the alleged events it describes) is part of someone's art project or experiment.
- ghaff 6y agoWell, the person telling a story is a real person and it's been printed in not only the Guardian but the BBC and I assume elsewhere. These are news organizations that do at least a modicum of fact-checking.
- agency 6y agoAnd the guy is clearly a real scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0g9Hm1cAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0g9Hm1cAAAAJ&hl=en...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- squarefoot 6y ago"We never contacted the police, because we didn’t think he’d done anything illegal. It was really an issue of academic misconduct." He should have contacted the Police immediately. What if a crime was committed nearby where the impostor was located under false identity, and he was later taken into custody instead? I don't know if it qualifies as a crime, but assuming someone else's identity can lead to very dangerous consequences.
- nomdep 6y agoThe whole story probably isn't true or it has been grossly exagerated.
- duxup 6y agoWhy do you think that?
- macintux 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604886
- nomdep 6y agoAha! So the reason he didn't file a police report was: "He never actually claimed to be me, he just stole all my moves" https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350379466313396224 https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350379466313396224
- jopsen 6y agoStill, making money of copyright infringement is often a crime. But if it's not a movie or music, I guess it might not matter so much. (on the other hand, the police probably has better things to do)
- ghaff 6y agoWell, they were in different countries so I'm not sure how receptive the police in California would have been. Contacting the school seems like an appropriate step.
- autophagian 6y agoFor the curious: this emerged as a twitter thread back in Jan https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350192856154198016 https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350192856154198016 . In it, Dr. Lodder posts a comparison between his tattoos and his imposters, as well as a talk his imposter gave based on his work, while dressed as him. Creepy.
- nchelluri 6y agoInteresting how the test score is 80% in the twitter thread and 95% in the article.
- Sebb767 6y agoI thought the same thing. Through the twitter thread references a magazine article, while the original article on talks about "something [he] wrote", so they might be different pieces. EDIT: Or the imposter gave the interview and added a mark up ;)
- ajcp 6y agoGiven he's a UK prof if he was told the paper was given an 'A' in the UK that can be anywhere from 70-100, while in the US it is 90-100. He might have initially split the difference, and then corrected it/was corrected for the article.
- worker767424 6y ago> in the US it is 90-100 In a science or engineering class, it might be everything above 40%.
- joejerryronnie 6y agoIn a high priced private US university, you may get an A just for showing up.
- ajcp 6y ago
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoReminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddit user didn't really fit that profile. Plus,it seems like r/emacs would be a really poor choice for that. I've always been curious to know why someone would do something like this. It's interesting to read about it happening on a way larger scale.
- xenonite 6y agoWell: Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddit user didn't really fit that profile. Plus,it seems like r/emacs would be a really poor choice for that. I've always been curious to know why someone would do something like this. It's interesting to read about it happening on a way larger scale.
- mahalol 6y agoWell, this is definitely the kind of content I wouldn't be surprised to read on reddit, but a bit disappointing to see it on HN.
- kvirani 6y agoI just did the same thing (out of laziness of course) and then saw this great point. Deleted mine.
- UShouldBWorking 6y agoThis is definitely the kind of content I wouldn't be surprised to read on reddit, but a bit disappointing to see it on HN
- chrisseaton 6y ago> Some of the work should have been spotted by plagiarism checkers I've been in postgraduate academia and industry, and been involved in multiple conferences at different levels. I'm not aware of anyone ever running a plagiarism detector on any submitted work at all. Do other people do this? Should the people I work with have been doing it?
- jonnat 6y agoMy daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.
- dylan604 6y agoIt's been a minute since I was in 5th grade. I'm trying to remember what kind of assignments I would have had where I could have plagiarized something that would not have been immediately obvious to the teacher.
- sgerenser 6y agoOnly thing I could think of is passing off big brother’s book report as my own. Would a plagiarism detector to work in that situation? Does every report and essay a child writes get added to the database for future works to be checked against?
- tkgally 6y agoMy mother was a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher in California fifty years ago. She would sometimes have her students write stories, and once one girl turned in a delightful little story that stood out from the others. My mother thought she showed real talent and praised her to the skies, showed the story to other teachers, brought it home and showed it to our family, etc. A year or two later, my mother happened across exactly the same story in a children’s book in the library. It was clear that the girl had just copied her story out of the book. My mother was really sad about the whole thing for quite a while.
- cbanek 6y agoWell they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (that mediocrity can pay to greatness). I wonder what this imposter thinks every time he looks down at the tattoos on his hands that will remind him of what he's done for quite a while, if not forever.
- ajcp 6y agoRight? Hopefully he didn't get them purely for the scam. He could genuinely like the tatts and general style of the guy. Hipster kitsch isn't even that unique.
- luckylion 6y agoThat's what I was thinking. The picture reminded me of that one story about a Hipster going after some website over an article claiming all Hipster look alike that he found used his picture without permission ... only to find out that it wasn't him. From the pictures of him and his colleague it seems that the people who study tattoos are into getting tattoos as well, I find it absolutely plausible that the guy got them separately. It's not like Letters On Fingers is such a new concept that everyone who does that copied him.
- irscott 6y agoHe had both a flower on his hand and the letters tattooed on his knuckles. Know More isn't a particularly common knuckle tattoo and to also have the same style of flower on the hand is definitely suspect. Even that type of flower as a hand tattoo isn't very common.
- luckylion 6y agoI wouldn't know how common it is, it just looked somewhat cliche to me, so I figured it wouldn't be rare. Like stickers on a mac book. Somebody should create a registry where people can lay claim to their tattoo's originality. Add blockchain, call it TATS, instant hit.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoBro, I heard of plagiarism of a paper but not like a whole person.
- csense 6y agoGetting the same tattoos as your target? That's one dedicated identity thief.
- imagica 6y agoBut a sad thing overall, imagine he's stuck with this identity now but it no longer bears fruits for him. I assume this person didn't have much of an identity in the first place..
- pizzapill 6y agoFrom the twitter link posted here it seems that "their" field of study is tattoos. The video of the talk of the impostor has a slide in the background with Victorian era tattoos. Seems like they both take them very seriously.
- dakial1 6y agoThis seems a case of a high level mythomaniac. Funnily enough I've encountered some in the recent years that got me thinking if this kind of psycho disease was increasing or simply I got more knowledgeable in a way that I started spotting it. I really don't know, because we can clearly spot this kind of people today (Trump anyone?) but is it getting worse or have they always been there? It something impressive the lenghts these kind of people go with their lies and deception, keeping a straight face even when the lie is obvious.
- formerly_proven 6y agoI'm pretty sure people who habitually lie about basically everything (Sayre's law applies, for some weird reason) are simply believing their own lies and cannot consistently tell reality from their made-up world. Any conflict between reality and their world is met with a defensive response (straight up acting like something was not brought up, shallow dismissals, changing topics, aggression). I didn't know there's a special word for this - mythomaniac - I just figured these guys are somewhere on the psychopath/sociopath scale. Edit: Trump put a slightly different twist on it, he lied as a show of power/dominance by lying about something which is immediately and obviously false, then observing that no one speaks up (i.e. submitting to his power).
- MrsPeaches 6y ago> that got me thinking if this kind of psycho disease was increasing or simply I got more knowledgeable in a way that I started spotting it Just FYI it's known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or the Frequency illusion [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- VectorLock 6y agoSo this guy just got found out, got kicked out of school, changed his social media profiles and then just... evaporated? Just running around out there doing whatever with another guy's tattoos?
- niels_bom 6y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just started copying someone else.
- spfzero 6y agoOr even if this wasn't the only guy he was copying at the same time.
- VectorLock 6y agoGonna have trouble matching fairly specific hand tattoos. I guess thats why the old adage of never getting hand tattoos applies very well to copying identities.
- Ansil849 6y agoI think the positive here is that more people got to learn about the person's work. Sure he didn't get credited, but the important thing should be his research, not himself. And the tattoos I can't even begin to understand what the issue is. Walking down a busy street, I can't begin to count how many mimicked tattoos I see.
- vletal 6y agoLike maybe if it was cited properly...
- k33n 6y agoObviously made up.
- mycologos 6y agoWhat makes you say that?
- getlawgdon 6y agoI find this certainty of rejection as disturbing as the certainty of immediate belief, only it's worse since it includes no reasoning.
- k33n 6y agoThat's pretty weird, but ok!
- guenthert 6y agoI wouldn't say obviously made up, but the story sure is incredible.
- foobar33333 6y agoVery sus
- worker767424 6y agoI feel like this was an Ed Sheeran music video.
- kebman 6y agoMan, this is just sad...
- mmaunder 6y agoTwist: The article is written by the imposter who discredited and then disappeared the real Dr Lodder.
- tinus_hn 6y agoDirected by M Night Shyamalan
- parsimo2010 6y agoI expect that in my lifetime there will be (or already has been) an imposter that gets a leg up on someone in this way and pulls it off- “no, I wrote the article first, they stole it from me and published it. Here are my drafts which predate their submission. Fire them, not me.”
- Qub3d 6y agoAs the imposter this is a really dangerous gambit, though. If it succeeds, and that person stops doing academic work, who does the imposter plagiarize from?
- parsimo2010 6y agoI suppose they would have to find someone else to plagiarize if they wanted to continue their con. I don’t think an impostor would set out to do this, they would prepare it as a backup plan in case they were discovered. At that point it’s dangerous, but the alternative is to give up and confess. That would make it seem like a worthy last ditch effort. Maybe if they pull it off they aren’t interested in sustaining the con long term, but rather just enough to solidify their gains and move on to something else.
- luckylion 6y agoSuccess predicts success. Maybe it works out: you get funding, you're regarded as a smart scientist etc, so your work is judged with that in mind. Especially in those parts of social sciences that are very essay-heavy and don't deal with disprovable claims and experiments, the difference between "that's total nonsense" and "another intelligent contribution by a fellow scholar" might be mostly knowing the author. They could transition into postmodern studies and use the Postmodern Generator [1] to get their new stuff. [1]: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
- disabled 6y agoI have been a victim of this, and it is still an ongoing matter. If you don't want to find yourself a victim of these kinds of people, then you better keep these two links as a reference, and always take them to heart: Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-online.html http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on... What to Remember When Dealing with a Narcissist: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-what-to-remember.html http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-wh... People who do this sort of stuff have narcissistic traits at minimum, which of course is an armchair diagnosis. But, these people really do not need to meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. All you need to know is that they are people who will harm you in some incredibly hurtful way, because they have contempt for you being yourself. Some of these people have antisocial traits, and are malignant narcissists. Some of them outright have both narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Regardless, these people tend to masquerade as "entrepreneurs", "researchers", "thinkers", "doers", or as "authors", when their entire works are just plagiarized material from others. People make entire livings off of such grifts and it becomes a central identity, if not their only identity. Of course, it is always about getting the next award or accolade, even though it is "empty" to them because they have intrinsically low self-esteem and an unbelievably fragile ego. But, of course they would never want you to know that.
- Veen 6y ago> Regardless, these people tend to masquerade as "entrepreneurs", "researchers", "thinkers", "doers", or as "authors" And activists.
- longshui 6y agowhen it is in a circle where the people know more or less who is who, its unlikely to happen any masquerading sometimes there are misunderstandings and some in the circle may have the impression that there is some masquerading going on sooner or later, I guess, things naturally clarify as time flows and the views are prettier
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- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- turingexam 6y agoI had a sort of similar incident happen with the youtuber Siraj Raval who was ripping off people's original projects (without attribution) and making videos about them -- and spun a career out of it. It took many attempts to get him to attribute my project (in accordance with its license) although he was caught repeating this type of behavior later on.
- swayvil 6y agoThat's a disappointingly remote kind of tracking-down. You need to meet him in person. He sounds like an awesome freak. There is way more to this story than just "plagiarism".
- Jamie9912 6y agoI totally thought this was just a bizarre way of explaining how he overcame imposter syndrome
- technick 6y agoIt's not illegal to kill yourself.
- Yaa101 6y agoThese people are called chimeras, some of them are so dangerous that they replace a person in real time, yes meaning that they kill the person to take it's place. Nature brings strange creatures.
- WoodenChair 6y agoThis is a crazy story. Especially the part where the person just claimed the other person's work as his own, not even pretending they were doing another version of it (more typical plagiarism). A small version of this happened to me many years ago. A dude who was a technical editor on my first book (and actually seemed to get fired by the publisher, because another technical editor replaced him midway through), claimed to be an author of the book on Stack Overflow and his own web page/resume. Truly bizarre because only my name was on the cover.
- unixhero 6y agoI would report it to the Police.
- rin72ka 6y agosecond that
- fnord77 6y agooveractive mirroring neurons? j/k, I'm sure this pathology is very complex.
- tocoder 6y agoThere's the consideration of lawful behavior. There's the consideration of restoring social justice. And then there's the consideration of compassion for the victim but also the perpetrator. The perpetrator is clearly in pain, which doesn't justify their wrong-doing -- they are in pain though.
- sussy65 6y agoWhen the pretender is mistrustful!
- cwkoss 6y agoI had to use TurnItIn throughout most of my academic years. Do they really not use it at the Masters level? Or does TurnItIn just not scrape enough to catch this?