I think there's an important lesson here: people are, by and large, good at seeing how anonymity on the Internet helps *them*, but most don't internalize all the ramifications of *others* doing so.

Plain and simply, most people, most of the time, instinctively take others at face value, and don't really grok how easy it can be to carry out a deliberate and well-planned lie. I was telling Alexx about this incident yesterday, and as I did so, it occurred to me how similar it is in general contour to some of the scams we have documented back to the SCA period...