The Trolls of Vanderhoven

How five unpersons kept me guessing for months, and are still doing it to others.

Here’s a new word for you to learn: “Affinity Scam”. This is a kind of scam in which the con artist poses as a member of a tightly integrated small community of some kind, such as a church, or an ethnic enclave in a large city (“Chinatown”, or “Little Italy”, etc). The con artist ingratiates himself to the leaders and prominent members of the group in order to improve his credibility among other members.

Some time in 2011, I met “Greta Forrester” that way. She was on my FB for a few months before I interacted with her in any meaningful way. When she first joined my list, I saw that she already had a number of local people I knew on her list, so I thought it was a safe bet that she was for real.

At some point in the fall of last year I started interacting with her a bit more – she was usually the first to post a response to any political comment I would make which was in any way critical of capitalism, or which was centre-left in its political orientation, even if not especially confrontational. She would state the business or corporate point of view in response, and she would to claim to be very rich, and therefore in a position to know what she was talking about. And she claimed to have a lot of time to play on the internet, being bedridden with an exotic disease acquired from an insect bite, while on an archaeological dig in Iraq.

In the weeks that followed, several other members of her family added themselves to my list. “Bob Folts”, “Fran Folts”, and “Angie Forrester”, and much later, “Kayla Van Duyn”, who claimed to have read and enjoyed one of my books.

I had a lot of private correspondence with Angie, who claimed to be responsible for the family’s finances, which was a very, very large trust fund. Large enough, so it was claimed, to put her and the members of their family into the 0.01%. Larger and larger stories were told about how she was personally involved in highly publicized events, like the negotiations for the IMF bailout of Greece. She also claimed to be personally rescuing people from Syria, when the civil war began there about a year ago. And, after months of daily private correspondence, I was given the impression, through subtle comments from Angie and others, that Angie might be interested in a romantic relationship with me. Angie even told me that in the summer of 2012 I would be invited to visit them in their family ancestral home in Belgium, a place called the Vanderhoven Estate, a place which had been in their family since Roman times.

All these little stories, unlikely-but-possible, just added up and added up. I went along with it mainly because I enjoyed the attention. I had doubts about the truth of their claims, but I mostly set them aside, until a friend pointed out to me that he searched their profile photos using Google and discovered that numerous photos in their profiles were stolen from other people. Did you know that you can drag-and-drop pictures into the search bar of Google Images, and do an internet search that way? Before that day, I didn’t either. So I, and a few others, searched as many of the photos as we could, and found a lot of them in their original sources. A schoolteacher from Indiana. A dead Vietnam war veteran. An American couple on holiday in Italy. A photo of Bob’s girlfriend “Steffania”, which he said was shot in Rome, but which I recognized as shot in Florence. The square in the centre of the city, with its ancient town hall, is very distinctive, and just about anyone who has studied European art history (as I have) should recognize it. We discovered a real person named Fran Folts, who was not deathly ill. And lots and lots of photos like that which came from other sources.

We could also find no evidence whatever of the existence of a place in Belgium called Vanderhoven Estate, nor of a company called Robosolutions, which Angie and Bob supposedly owned.

So I decided to confront them with the evidence, and also to warn everyone I knew who had them on their FB lists. Shortly afterward, two friends of mine and I stayed up late at night, arguing with Bob, about the evidence we had uncovered. All he did was deny and redirect and counter-accuse: the standard strategy of a cornered con-man who won’t admit his lies. I even offered him a way out: he could phone me. I gave my number. But he didn’t call, citing “security” reasons. He wouldn’t even pick up an ordinary untraceable burnable cellphone, if he was worried about me calling him back. This seemed absurd since FB is much less secure than the phone system. He was like an angry teenager, really, in his belligerent counter-accusations of how we invaded his privacy to search the photos he had (publicly) posted to FB – and which are stored in the cache of your browser anyway. He even threatened us with visits from security intelligence agents.

But nothing happened. There were no visits from foreign intelligence agents. None of the threats they issued were carried out. It really ended not with a bang but a whimper. I got one last minute note from “Bob” the following morning, in which he stated his grievance against me one last time, for not believing him, for downloading his FB photos and thus “invading his privacy”, and for not talking it over with him first before telling 20 others. But by then he had blocked my FB profile and it was impossible for me to reply. It reminded me of the “last word” that petulant spoiled children sometimes demand. And that was it.

I saved the whole conversation to my hard drive, as well as all the private correspondence with Angie, and all the photos that I could. They’ve blocked me on FB but as of November 2012 I know they are back again, and stupidly using the same photos and the same fake names and backstories.

The only really good thing that can be said about them is that all they seemed to want was attention. As far as I know, they never asked anyone for money or favours. But they liked to keep things dramatic, and keep themselves at the centre of things. They were fun, I have to admit. But they manipulated my emotional life for months, and expressed absolutely no remorse for it. The distance of the Internet allows them to escape having to face the real human emotional consequences of their actions.

So I won’t have them back now, unless they own up to their identity thefts, and come clean with who they really are. In fact I think it’s one person, using five or six accounts. For the writing style is the same in every case.

They also had another effect on my private life. For one thing, as someone trained in logic and critical thinking, I feel quite disappointed in myself, even ashamed, for being sucked into the charade. I got sucked into it because I live alone, after all, and I have very few friends living in the same city as me. (There, I admitted it: I’m a perfect target for this kind of internet scam.) Also, in January of 2012 I went on a date with a really wonderful local woman, who I really liked a lot, and who I let go, because I had invested months of my time and emotions into building a friendship with “Angie”. So I’m very confident that my life would have gone differently, and probably have been happier, without them.

The Trolls (in the sense of internet trolls) of Vanderhoven (their fake ancestral home) often claimed they joined Facebook as an experiment in meeting and getting along with ordinary people. I think the truth is that all five fake profiles are run by one person, someone probably lonely, and who gets a kick out of riling people up, and who enjoys feeling superior when others believe the story. Perhaps he enjoys the fantasy of being rich, and enjoys being treated like a rich man, when he interacts with people on FB. On the internet, real people’s lives are often indistinguishable from characters in a movie or a television show, and many of the moral and psychological resources which restrain people from hurting others do not engage. This allows people to sit back and view the struggles and frustrations of other people as a source of entertainment. I think the true experiment, then, was to see how tall a tale he could tell before he got caught, and to see how gullible people can be. Especially when the story features beautiful women and large sums of money.

As an aside, I suspect that one of the fake profiles used photos of the real person behind it all, but I don’t know that for sure.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: whenever you hear a tall tale about someone’s life, always remember to invoke your sense of reasonable doubt. It might be true, it might not be true. But “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence”, and “all other things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the truth.” So if someone on your social media streams claims to be personally acquainted with Warren Buffet, it’s best to assume the claim is false.

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The following is the complete and unedited text of the FB email that I sent to the five fake profiles on 9th March 2012. Although the link to the teacher at the school in Indiana now shows a different photo than the one which, at the time, was being used by “Kayla Van Duyn”, it’s clearly the same woman. The other links still show much (but not all) of the evidence of identity theft committed by whoever was behind the fake profiles.

The time has come, I think, for me to pose some very serious questions to you.

Recently, as you know, I discovered that your photo of Steffania was shot in Florence and not in Rome. It struck me as odd that a former military man would make such an elementary mistake about where he went on a date with a girlfriend. And began to think of a few other little incongruities and inconsistencies in your backstory, which I overlooked at first because I was enjoying the conversation.

So I started paying very close attention to some of the photos that you’ve been posting over time. And I started sharing my suspicions with around twenty local friends of mine who you have befriended.

We discovered that Fran Folts is using several stolen photos of a young couple on holiday in Italy, and passing them off as if they are pictures of herself.
http://groups.physics.umn.edu/mmc/personnel/pete/Travel_pics/Pete_and_Amanda_in_Italy[Jul-Aug_2003]/Italy.htm

When Kayla joined Facebook, we quickly discovered that she stole a photo from a school teacher from Indiana, named Stephanie Graves.
http://www.lafayettechristian.org/faculty/graves/?from_faculty_listing=1&l&u&f

and that Greta is using a fake photo too:
http://www.lasplumas66-70.com/class_classmates.cfm?year_id=1970&sort1=0&sort2=0&f3=c&yp=y

and that’s an interesting one since the actual person depicted in the photo here is in fact named Greta, and that there’s someone named Forrester a little further down the page.

Also, we found that Bob’s sitting room in Fiji is actually in California:
http://homgroup.com/Encinitas/

and that the photo of the British soldier that Greta claimed to have met in Iraq actually came from this web site:
http://www.hobotraveler.com/123_07baghdadistanbul01.shtml

and the list goes on.

As of this moment, I’m 99% convinced that the five of you are actually one or two people, not five, and that you are con artists and liars.

Really, the only good thing that can be said about you is that you haven’t asked anyone to send you money.

Given the nature of the friendship I was building with Angie, I’m feeling profoundly betrayed, and very angry.

We in the pagan community have had to deal with con artists and troublemakers before, up to and including evangelical christian missionaries making death threats. A lot of people here are feeling very suspicious of your true intentions, and even a little fearful.

Now if you have an explanation for this, I’d like to hear it. But it had better be very, very good. I will not accept dismissals or red herring arguments. I want clear, unambiguous, direct, and convincing evidence that you are who you say you are.

This identity theft you have committed is very seriously morally wrong, and we can’t trust anyone who could mislead people this way. So come clean about who you really are. Or leave us alone.