david yates

[Gabu]

I haven't said anything about this until now, but I've heard from other members who analyzed the emails received from Edward Yates, purportedly his brother with him in Iowa, and found that they originated from Florida.  I think that there is evidence there that points to the possibility that it was an elaborate hoax.

[Gabu]

WOAH!  Is there another thread about this, or is this the first?
I've definitely been in the dark about this...

The correspondence was mostly over AIM.

[Gabu]

The question is,  why would someone do this?  Sheer boredom?

It would not exactly be the first time someone faked something horrible on the internet for attention.

[Gabu]

If he was "likely to die", why would he have said on the forum point blank that doctors had given up hope and that he was going home to live the rest of his life?  Generally you don't give an exact time interval that you have left to live when you aren't even sure if you're going to die at all.

This smells like total BS.  And I'll be honest, I never said so at the time, but I was never particularly affected by this as others were because I've had run-ins with this sort of thing in the past.  I think there was something in the back of my mind telling me not to get too uptight about this because it could very well not be true.

Yates was purportedly an executive with a six-figure income.  I would think that someone with that sort of smarts could come up with something a wee bit better than a totally made-up ailment to tangentially refer to something that he actually has.

[Gabu]

With all respects everyone, we've been lied to.  We should just move on.  No good is going to come of this.  There's not any way to tell if it really was connected to someone else.  Let's not turn into a lynchmob.

If this gets out of control, I'm going to have to lock it.

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I think that this calls for a mass genocide of people from Iowa and Florida, just to be on the safe side.

[Gabu]

I'm just very disappointed with Yates. I'm not angry. The news of his 'brain cancer' really knocked me for six, I was devastated

The thing is if David was, genuinely, gravely ill, then that's all he needed to say. He didn't have to fictionalize it

I'm trying to think of it as a 'big white lie'. No harm was meant but it did cause heartache and that's what I'm trying to reconcile all this with

I still care though and still consider him a friend

Dave

That's assuming his attempted explanation is true.  As I noted in my post, there are a number of problems with it.

I think it's entirely possible that this is all one big hoax played on us by someone with too much time on his hands.

[Gabu]

People don't recover from AIDS, and, while any STD might be embarassing, no other STDs come close to killing people who have the means to routinely post on forums in the US.

And especially not when they're executives who make six-figure incomes, as Yates has claimed to.

[Gabu]

People don't recover from AIDS, and, while any STD might be embarassing, no other STDs come close to killing people who have the means to routinely post on forums in the US.

And especially not when they're executives who make six-figure incomes, as Yates has claimed to.

He claimed to be something like that?

At one point, yes.  In a topic on posters' annual incomes, he said something to the effect of not wanting to reveal his income because it was so large.

[Gabu]

Something that adds a little more suspicion, how many 26 year olds have such incomes?

I know many who leave college making a minimum of $50K, but then again, they are entering technical fields.  I don't remember what Yates said he did in his profession.

I believe he claimed to be some sort of senior executive.