People Using Fake Sickness or Hardship To Con People Out Of Their Money, Attention, or Empathy
I came across this headline the other day in my Twitter feed:
(Link): Woman claimed she was bedridden to con more than £620,000 out of council
Excerpts from that article:
June 25, 2022
by S. Johnson
A woman claimed she was bedridden to con more than £620,000 from a council which she then used to pay for luxury holidays to America.
Frances Noble, 66, fooled social workers to commit what is suspected to be one of the largest fraud cases of its type to ever come before the English courts.
Between 2005 and 2018, Noble convinced Hertfordshire County Council she needed intensive round-the-clock home care.
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I’ve seen similar news stories in the past several years – someone will claim to have cancer, or some other kind of hardship, but they are lying about it, and the reason they’re lying is to obtain monetary donations from the public.
Here’s another example (I may edit this post in the future to include more examples):
I’ve written other posts about how I (Link): spent over three decades as a codependent.
What I learned when I began getting over codependency, what I had my eyes opened to, is that there are people out there, whether legitimate victims or legitimately wounded in life,
or people who “play” at being a victim (some of these individuals may be (Link): Covert Narcissists) who will manipulate you, who will intentionally play on your pity and your heart strings or your guilt or sense of duty,
to get you to donate money to them, or to do things like listen to them complain weekly or monthly with compassion (ie, provide them with (Link): emotional labor), as they reiterate the same complaints repeatedly.
If you believe you may be a codependent, an empath with poor boundaries (which is essentially what a codependent is, but some people do not like the label “codependent”), or if you’re a people pleaser, I’d like for you to really get serious about not allowing your sense of compassion or empathy to sway you or to control every decision in your life.
Please stop automatically caving in and sending people money – because they ask you to, or you find out they’re going through a tough time, or because they look or sound sad.
Please stop feeling as though it’s your obligation or duty to rescue other people or do favors for them.
If you have a hard time saying “no” to people – out of fear of angering them, disappointing them, coming across as “selfish,” and/or from a fear of abandonment (i.e., “this person won’t stay in a relationship with me unless I keep doing favors for her”), please start researching the topic of people pleasing, boundaries, and codependency online if you cannot afford to see a therapist who specializes in the issue.
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