Body Of Lies Free Online

[Riley Dyen]

Theinternet has given rise to new forms of deceit and misinformation, including phishing attacks, romance scams and fake news. While many psychological studies have investigated the factors that influence people's ability to tell if others are lying in person, lie detection online has seldomly been explored.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding why people are deceived online. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, outlines interesting patterns underlying the detection of lies online.

"People all around the world have been losing billions to online scams year on year," Tali Sharot and Sarah Zheng, co-authors of the paper, told Medical Xpress. "This trend has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic and is worsening with the advent of generative AI. Now, before we can help people detect online scams, we need to understand why people fall for them in the first place."

As both scams and fake news are rooted in lies, Zheng, Rozenkrantz and Sharot first reviewed past literature focusing on lie detection. They found that most previous works focused on offline contexts, where people can also try to detect lies based on subtle cues, such as a person's tone of voice, their gaze and body language.

"In online settings, we typically cannot rely on such cues," Sharot and Zheng explained. "We thus set out to study why people can be particularly bad at detecting lies, and thus scams, in an online context."

Zheng, Rozenkrantz and Sharot conducted three experiments involving 310 people who were asked to take part in an online card game played in pairs. As part of this game, they were given some information about how likely it was for them to be dealt each card from a deck. Notably, certain cards would result in winning money, while others might cause a financial loss.

Participants could choose to lie about the card they received, as this could allow them to win more money at the expense of another player. The participants were never instructed to lie; hence the decision of whether to be truthful or not was solely theirs.

"At the end of each play, participants rated how honest they thought the other player was," Sharot and Zheng said. "We examined what cues people used to judge others' honesty. For example, did they think others lied when they themselves did? Did they think others lied when the other person reported having a rare card? And did they think others lied when they themselves lost?"

When they analyzed the data they collected, the researchers observed two fascinating patterns. First, they observed that people were more suspicious of others if they had themselves lied during the game, but also when other players had reported holding a statistically unlikely card.

Zheng, Rozenkrantz and Sharot also compared the behavior of players to the predictions of an artificial, simulated lie detector, Interestingly, they found that poor lie detection was associated with an over-reliance on one's own honesty (or dishonesty) and an under-reliance on statistical cues.

This recent work by Zheng, Rozenkrantz and Sharot sheds some new light on the factors underpinning people's ability to detect others' deceptions online. In the future, they could guide the efforts of policymakers and technology firms who are working to prevent internet users from falling into the traps of scammers and platforms disseminating false information.

"Our findings led to the idea of creating an 'adversarial training' to help people detect online scams," Sharot and Zheng added. "That is, people may get better at detecting scams after engaging with scam creation themselves. Initial results looking at detection of phishing e-mails look promising and we now aim to test this further in other contexts."

Kacie's case is possibly the first well-documented case of a pedophile using the Internet to groom, abduct, and murder a victim,[citation needed] being featured on the Investigation Discovery documentary shows Web of Lies[5] and Man with a Van,[6] and the podcast Crime Junkie. After Kacie's murder, her friends and family founded the Kacie Woody Foundation to educate parents and children about the dangers associated with the Internet.

Kacie was born on October 17, 1989, at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Rick and Kristie Woody. She had two brothers, Austin and Tim. On June 19, 1997, when Kacie was 7 years old, her mother died in a car accident, while the family was on their way home from Tim's baseball game. The car collided with a horse that had run into the road; the animal shattered the windshield and hit Kristie, who was sitting in the passenger seat. Everyone else in the vehicle survived, although Rick, who was driving, suffered broken ribs.[7]

In 2002, Kacie lived in Holland, Arkansas, with her father, Rick, her brother Tim, and Tim's friend, Eric Betts. Her maternal aunt, Teresa Paul, lived in the house next door.[8] Kacie was enrolled at Greenbrier Middle School, being a member of the band, choir, and talented and gifted programs.[1] Kacie was described as a very friendly and caring girl who was very close to her family and friends, and whose hobbies included poetry, singing, dancing, and playing the saxophone.[9]

The Woody home was in a heavily wooded rural area, and due to many outgoing landline calls being billed as long distance, Rick allowed Kacie to use instant messaging on the family's computer to keep in touch with her friends. She registered on Yahoo! Messenger with either the username "modelbehavior63" or "modelbehavior36" (accounts vary). Kacie eventually started using chat rooms to meet new friends, and on either New Year's Eve 2001 (according to Web of Lies), or in the summer of 2002 (according to the written account, Caught in the Web), she befriended Fuller, who went by the username "jazzman_df" and gave his name as Dave Fagen.[3] The photo on jazzman_df's profile was of a "surfer dude"-type attractive young man; he claimed to love surfing and the beach, and the two bonded quickly and began to chat often. Kacie eventually told Dave about the loss of her mother, and he told her that his "aunt", who also happened to live in Arkansas, was recently in a car accident and was now comatose, and that she was not expected to live much longer.

Kacie felt sad about Dave's aunt and told her family and friends about him and the situation. Her close friends Sam and Jessica also befriended Dave and added him to their Yahoo "buddy" lists. At the same time, Sam was fearful over Kacie's naivety and warned her about becoming close to and falling in love with people that she hadn't met in person. Since Kacie's father worked long swing shifts as a police officer with the Greenbrier police department, he stated during his Web of Lies interview that he often wasn't home to monitor her Internet activity, although he was, at the time, aware that she was talking to boys online. He wasn't particularly worried, as long as he knew that she was at home and the boys were elsewhere.[5] Around the summer of 2002, when Kacie told him that Dave was turning 18, Rick told her to stop talking to him online, stating that Dave was too old for her; Kacie disobeyed Rick and started talking with Dave over the phone, despite the long-distance charges.

One night, likely in the autumn of 2002, Dave called Kacie while her friend Jessica was spending the night at Kacie's house. During this time, the girls heard strange sounds around the outside of the house, and a floorboard squeaked in the kitchen, as if an intruder was on the property. The girls rushed into Kacie's bedroom and blocked the door with a dresser. Kacie told Dave that she was afraid someone was in the house; he told her that nobody was in the house and not to worry; the noises then stopped.

Kacie's friend Sam was doubtful as to Dave's stated age, based on his use of outdated slang, including such terms as "groovy" and "far out". Kacie had assumed this was due to him being from California, and that people there talked differently than in Arkansas.[7][6]

At some point, Kacie met an actual boy in a chat room, Tazz2999. He claimed to be a 14-year-old named Scott from Alpharetta, Georgia, who loved football and wrestling. The photo on his profile was of a young teen boy in a football uniform. Kacie and Scott began "dating"[clarification needed] on October 3, 2002. When Dave learned about the relationship, he stated that he wished to "remain friends" with Kacie; he also increased his talk about his aunt and her "worsening condition".

On the morning of Tuesday, December 3, 2002, Sam noticed that Kacie had the photo from Scott's online profile hanging in her locker and remarked that he was "hot"; Kacie misheard as "fat" and became angry, resulting in an argument between the two. When Sam asked Kacie how she got the photo, she told her that Scott had mailed it to her. Alarmed to hear that the photo of Scott had been mailed to Kacie, Sam warned her again about giving her address to people whom she had never met in person, telling her that Scott "could be an 80-year-old rapist and that the photo could be of his grandson". Kacie did not take this warning seriously. Without her knowledge, Sam told the school counselor that Kacie had been giving out her phone number to strangers online; the counselor called Kacie into her office, warned her about the dangers of the Internet, and told her not to meet any online friends in person without a parent present. Kacie responded that she only gave her phone number to people her father approved, a statement which Sam did not believe. The counselor then called Sam to the office, leaving her and Kacie alone to talk; they reconciled. When school ended, Kacie asked Sam if she could spend the night at her house. The latter declined, because her mother likely wouldn't have allowed a sleepover on a school night, and Kacie would have needed a written note from her father in order to be allowed to be dropped off at Sam's house.[6] Kacie then asked Jessica, and then another friend. Both of them turned it down as well. She appeared not to be upset about the refusals and said goodbye to her friends before boarding the school bus. Sam and Jessica found it unusual that Kacie had asked about a sleepover on a school night.

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