I'm extremely hesitant to believe stories from people like this. I had an experience in the early 2000s with someone who was part of an online community. I was a moderator in a sense for that community. The person created 2 personas within our group and pretended to be in a relationship with each other. This was unknown to us. Later one of them got cancer and the story evolved into this caretaker sympathy thing. Everyone was concerned.

Short version of the story is the cancer story started to get a bit suspicious. I had the ability to check IP addresses of people on the forum so I did. Both people had the same IP address and I knew they supposedly didn't live together. This prompted moto start gently asking other people if something seemed strange and I was surprised to find that most people had the same thoughts but were too afraid to say anything. Everyone had their own details so when we combined everything it became obvious the person was farming sympathy by faking cancer then death of the fake persona.

Only now am i realizing the crazy similarities between this incident and modern TRA attention seeking.

AND ACTUALLY writing this made me realize something crazy. There is this MtF twitch streamer who has been super annoying and toxic on a popular game recently. Their character has the same name as the one who faked cancer in my old game... Holy shit...