The Truth About Ruth - Part 3

[Curious]

Would she still be able to delete her posts here?

No, she can't.

Which, btw, is one of the reasons we are so against content deletion period.

[Curious]

Creaky posted earlier and did, in fact, confirm that her contact with "Ruth" had been over PM or email, and one phone call that didn't really go anywhere. I don't know if it was this thread or the other one in Chatter.

ETA - her post is in Chatter - http://freejinger.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 66#p590166

Ah thanks. I am still trying to catch up and haven't got to the chatter thread yet :)

[Curious]

What if RR has a sock on FJ that she's just been hiding by using a different computer than her own? Like a library computer or something?

Oh my gosh, people. I don't know what to tell you at this point. We've already said, yes it's *possible* that the person portraying RR has a sock on FJ. However, at this point we have absolute NO evidence that this is the case. We are being extra careful regarding activations of new members and will be for the foreseeable future. We can only do so much and nothing is 100%.

Honestly, she wasn't smart enough to mask the person that she NEEDED to hide, so I find it really hard to believe she was clever enough to set up a bunch of hidden socks in the event that she was outed.

[Rachel333]

It would have been so easy to just use a proxy and solve the IP issue.

[Deesire]

I don't have much to say but since I've read a good deal of the threads, I wanted to post.

Way to go to everyone who has been documenting everything so well. It may prove highly useful in identifying any further scams by the same person.

[Rachel333]

I must be a right bitch, because I don't care if she's "sick." Sometimes people do bad things not because they're sick, but because they're bad people with no conscience. I'm not sure why everyone insists that if someone does something wrong, they must be sick.

I have a ton of sympathy for mental illness (though being mentally ill doesn't mean you get to be an asshole either). I am far from convinced that this case is an actual mental illness, though. Sometimes people just do weird stuff.

[Curious]

That makes a lot of sense, Curious. Did she make money during the Penn Mommy stuff?

I'm not really clear on that, to be honest. From what I can tell, Penn Mommy never actively solicited funds, but I also think something went wrong with that scheme and it was prematurely starting to be ended (even before it was outed). I don't know whether she figured it wouldn't be a money maker or the gosselin fans/non-fans were something that she found out were too scary to deal with (my best guess) or what, but from all the reading I've done it feels like it was something that was abruptly ended. It's a little bit harder to get the full picture because they didn't archive the blogs and they weren't indexed so a lot of the information was lost, unfortunately.

There is some speculation that PM was (is?) a moderator on GWOP/DWOP under yet a different name, but in the small amount of digging we did, we didn't find any evidence of that. It's actually something I'm curious (hah!) about and would like to research more at some point.

[colder by the lake]

I read FJ often but rarely post -- and like many, I've been following this situation obsessively the last few days. But I just had to respond this time...

This is just the feeling I have gotten from doing a metric shitton of reading about this stuff over the last few days.

Metric shitton...god I love that! Thanks for the laugh, Curious!

And seriously -- I just wanted to add my thanks to OE, Curious, and the other admins/mods/members who have done some amazing work on this. :clap:

[Lainey]

I have a ton of sympathy for mental illness (though being mentally ill doesn't mean you get to be an asshole either). I am far from convinced that this case is an actual mental illness, though. Sometimes people just do weird stuff.

Oh, I do too. I'm also not convinced that everything is a result of mental illness, though. Like this. Maybe she's just an asshole, you know?

[daisyfern]

I read FJ often but rarely post -- and like many, I've been following this situation obsessively the last few days. But I just had to respond this time...

Metric shitton...god I love that! Thanks for the laugh, Curious!

And seriously -- I just wanted to add my thanks to OE, Curious, and the other admins/mods/members who have done some amazing work on this. :clap:

I agree. Everyone involved has worked so hard.

[Courdoroy]

I want my $25.00 back, but even more I want personal info. shared in an e-mail back (no not location, something much more personal). I should have had a clue back then, though. I could tell by her blog that she was SOMEWHERE in central CA...so am I...I suggested meeting...and...nothing.... the wagon hitched to the horses should have been a clue too...yes there are people really into horses in some areas of central CA, but it's as in riding..I don't know of anyone that hitches them to a wagon (except maybe for a parade or something)..Hayrides and such are usually tractor drawn...

[Ralar]

I'd I didn't know C****/Ruth/Mary was scrubbing the RR blog, I would have thought it very weird that a half dozen posts, all from around the time fictional Rachel gave birth to a fictional baby and then chose a fictional lesbian couple to adopt said fictional baby, suddenly showed up in my RSS feed.

[Minerva]

I'd I didn't know C****/Ruth/Mary was scrubbing the RR blog, I would have thought it very weird that a half dozen posts, all from around the time fictional Rachel gave birth to a fictional baby and then chose a fictional lesbian couple to adopt said fictional baby, suddenly showed up in my RSS feed.

So as she edits her posts, it shows up to the people who are subscribed to her blog? Wow, it sounds like she's remarkably un-tech-savvy for someone who's running an online scam.

[Minerva]

Oh my gosh, people. I don't know what to tell you at this point. We've already said, yes it's *possible* that the person portraying RR has a sock on FJ. However, at this point we have absolute NO evidence that this is the case. We are being extra careful regarding activations of new members and will be for the foreseeable future. We can only do so much and nothing is 100%.

Honestly, she wasn't smart enough to mask the person that she NEEDED to hide, so I find it really hard to believe she was clever enough to set up a bunch of hidden socks in the event that she was outed.

Right. Maybe I shouldn't have brought up the idea of her using a different computer...

[okayobee]

The simultaneous scrubbing of the blog and the FB book is what sealed the deal for me. Might be coincidence that two people would travel from CA to IL but another coincidence that they both start scrubbing their data? Nope. Then I had the chance to read through truth-about-ruth and read the locations of postings. I donated (foolishly) and emailed to ask for my money back. If I don't get it back I'm reporting her to PayPal for fraud. If enough of us do it they may look into it.

[FiddleDD]

The only thing that fascinates me more than internet scamming is watching scammers get outed, publicly, in real time.

Also, the amount of information available on the internet is why I never understood people trying to hide their identities. If someone wants to know badly enough, they'll find you. Which is something scammers never seem to learn...

[Rachel333]

Is it a problem that this kind of stuff always makes me think of how much better I could be at having a fake online persona? :lol: I've seen so many over the years that I've picked up a few things. I do this for crimes, too. I am at least impressed at how long she's lasted.

[SoybeanQueen]

If one of my friends suddenly said "soooo I see that yet again you are being accused of running a scam and they don't seem to be insane like the Gosselin fans," that would probably be an indicator to me that shit has hit the fan.

This strikes me as extremely funny. Wooo! We're not as craycray as the Gosselin fans!

[Lady Elaine]

I never believed Razing Ruth. I suppose it's easy to say this now. I never said anything before because so many people seemed supportive of her here. I wonder how many people felt the same way but kept quiet. We could have figured this out a long time ago.

First of all, I doubt all blogs that don't include a picture of the blogger and/or names and places. I think I really started to doubt her around the time she broke her ankle. The whole sister story was so ridiculous. Then she broke up with her boyfriend and became homeless (even though she claimed to have bought the trailer outright in a previous post) - and I saw that she started playing on a common sympathy here - mental illness. That's when I knew for sure she was fake.

But there was one thing that happened recently that made me think this was going to unravel fast. The whole driving through a tornado to get to her job. I mean, come on! That and her ovarian cyst story -- funny how that exact same story happened to Joan on Mad Men two weeks earlier. Sheesh.

[jenny_islander]

I thought she was perhaps a bit heedless of her personal safety and drawn to situations that were familiar because they weren't healthy, both not unknown in adult survivors of childhood abuse and neglect. But I started to doubt her when her pregnant-out-of-wedlock sister wanted to give her baby to a lesbian couple and was there and gone and there and gone again.

Too broke to ever give her money.

[spookyginger]

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this yet, but in this article Calladus links Possum Momma directly to Penn Mommy by saying that Penn Mommy was a "somewhat distant relation of Possum Mama". There are a number of interesting links in this article as well, in which Calladus talks about how the Atheist in a Minivan blog came to be shut down. It sounds like he has actually met our woman of many identities, and her children, in person before.

I still think they're all the same person (Calladus excluded, obviously. Not a sock) 8-)

articles.exchristian.net/2008/10/atheist-in-minivan-blog-attacked-by.html

ETA: if you read the comments here, you'll see that someone has posted a number of other screen names under which she may have posted. mojoey.blogspot.com/2008/10/i-support-possummomma.html

[Curious]

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this yet, but in this article Calladus links Possum Momma directly to Penn Mommy by saying that Penn Mommy was a "somewhat distant relation of Possum Mama". There are a number of interesting links in this article as well, in which Calladus talks about how the Atheist in a Minivan blog came to be shut down. It sounds like he has actually met our woman of many identities, and her children, in person before.

I still think they're all the same person 8-)

articles.exchristian.net/2008/10/atheist-in-minivan-blog-attacked-by.html

I'm not quite sure how to read your post when you say "I think they are all the same person," if you are lumping Calladus in the "all.' Calladus, is not a RR sock, though. He is an actual verifiable person. He's easy to identify as a separate person from PM and has a large internet footprint that is easy to verify.

If you were just talking about Penn Mommy and Possummomma and her various socks, then I agree they are all the same person :)

[spookyginger]

Sorry I wasn't clear, Curious. No, I don't think Calladus is a sock. That has been proven. But I do think Penn Mommy and Possummomma are the same person. How can they not be?

[Artemis]

Right now, the only way I'd believe 'Calladus' and 'Razing Ruth' were not the same persona/federated scammers would be to see them IRL standing together, with identification papers etc. 'Folie a deux' anyone?

Sorry 'Calladus' but a woman who's experienced in scamming like this could easily fake a whole persona over the internet over a period of years, just to provide a spurious 'verification' when exactly this sort of shit hits the fan. Complete with a spurious life history, photographs, etc.

I also think that anyone determined enough to produce a scam like this would be capable of creating another FJ persona quite some while back - maybe another high count poster, or even two, and that they would not easily be identifiable as socks. Anyone using TOR would be unidentifiable - that's why TOR exists.

"Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol." (From the TOR website.)

Could the admins here actually determine who was/was not an RR alter ego if the alter ego was using TOR?

Using TOR is it possible to ensure that you have two or more apparent IP 'addresses' but in fact be posting from the same physical location?

Also, if you are in on this scam with a friend, if you regularly post from their computer, would you have a different IP address?

This was a carefully thought out little business - there's no reason to believe in 'Calladus' as anything other than an enabler of the scam, even if he has provided 'identification'. Anyone who supports 'RR' or any of her many aliases is, as far as I'm concerned, either 'RR' herself' or a partner scammer.

I see no reason to accept anything anyone says on the internet as truth, now or at any time. I would very much like to know the 'Creaky Steel' answer, and I'm also happy to go on record as saying, Rachel333, that you're on my suspicious list as well. Despite your post count, there's just a little too much about the alacrity with which you've posted on the Ruth forums, your 'trailing' of the 'redacted' family, and your dragging 'Creaky Steel' into it for my liking.

Please don't feel obliged to justify yourself, as I'm unlikely to believe you - I have no intention of doing any internet sleuthing as I have neither the time nor the inclinations, and I merely wish to put this out there - because, you know, if I were 'RR' I think I might find it quite amusing to, having kicked the beehive, watch the bees mill around in confusion.

I'm pretty sure you're out there watching us, my dear, whoever you currently are. I do hope karma bites you hard in the butt someday soon . . . . although not to the harm of your innocent offpring, of course.

And if you are out there, I'd like to leave it on record that the $20 I gave you, you now owe to some other poor bastard who is trying to lead a decent and honest life, in poverty and difficulty, without resorting to fraud.

ETA 'RR' your slimy venality disgusts me. Even slime moulds are honest. I sincerely hope that in your next life you're reincarnated in amoeboid form, so that you have to learn to co-operate or die. Humanity co-exists in relationships of mutual trust. Whatever trusting relationship you think you may have with anyone, your behaviour over this taints them irretrievably. Even your relationship with your trusting children is based on lies.

ETA also. Please don't anyone give me the 'but you should never trust anyone on the internet'. I didn't. I don't. My 'widow's mite was given in good faith, in the knowledge that it might be received in bad faith. That's not the issue. I am simply, in default of other options, using this window to express an opinion about your fraud, 'RR'.

[Mama Mia]

Artemis, Creaky Steel posted a couple of responses either in this thread or the one in chatter.