The cruellest of internet hoaxes

Little Charly Johns was a trouper.

She was only six years old and had cancer - but she fought it with determination. She was in and out of hospital as the disease advanced and retreated.

It was tough too for her mother Anna. She joined the Macmillan online cancer forum.

There she found support and help from people who knew exactly what she was going through.

For two years, Anna kept them updated on Charly's progress.

"On the whole she is doing great," she wrote. "She is happy, lively, giggly and very easily excitable. She is always the first to laugh at anything and the last to stop. Nobody could look at Charly now and have any idea of the things she has endured these past 14 months."

But in November last year, Charly lost her fight for life. On the Macmillan forum there was an outpouring of grief. People wrote poems in Charly's memory. They painted their fingernails pink in accordance with her last wishes - even men.

But it was all a lie. Charly did not exist. Neither did Anna .

The whole thing was a hoax, discovered when the church in Paris where Charly's funeral was to be held turned out to have no record of her.

The perpetrator, it transpired, was a teenage girl. The pictures of "Charly" were the girl herself when younger.

Many on the Macmillan forum refused to believe it. They had formed close online relationships with Anna. It seemed impossible that a teenager could have had such emotional maturity. Others left the forum in despair.

"These are some very desperate people," says Jackie Marshall, a member of the Macmillan forum. "People who may not have long to live, who are sharing burdens with complete strangers, because they are not comfortable sharing with families. The forum provides a lifeline."

It wasn't the first time Macmillan has been hoaxed, and Macmillan isn't the only forum to have been affected by impostors.

An American psychiatrist, Marc Feldman, has described it as "Munchausen by internet", similar to the well-known Munchausen syndrome, in which people fabricate illnesses to gain attention and sympathy.

It's no exaggeration to say there's an epidemic of MBI, and one which destroys the trust that underpins the forums.

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