This Mysterious Boy Was Either a Con Man or a Secret Prince

What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. Nowhere is this sentiment more true than in the media, where hoaxes regularly appear and take readers on wild rides before being exposed as fake. It's hard to say exactly what compels people to commit hoaxes. On one hand, hoaxes have a miraculous ability to drum up public support for a purported notion regardless of race, class, or ethnic lines. On the other, when hoaxes turn out to be false, they make fools of believers and point fingers at people's ability to believe anything if it's sold well enough. The most unforgivable hoaxes, however, involve the use of children.

As master media puppeteer Mark Twain once said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." When that lie involves children, it travels even quicker. In terms of hoaxes involving children, they truly run the gamut. Some, like the Balloon Boy Hoax in 2009, come from misguided attempts to market to media outlets. Others, like the story of Kaspar Hauser, are more nebulous and suggest everything from the tactics of a clever young con man to a maze-like royal conspiracy. Whatever the reasons, hoaxes involving children expose the most opportunistic impulses in human beings. In this article, we will explore several of them. (For childhood habits, discover formerly common childhood activities now deemed dangerous.)

To compile an article about children used in hoaxes, 24/7 Tempo consulted a range of historical and news publications including Denver7 News, Livescience.com, and NPR.org. Next, we selected hoaxes that either used real children as ploys or ones that were made up entirely. After that, we confirmed aspects of our research using sites like BBC.com and The Washington Post.

A story about hoaxes wouldn't be complete without mentioning Balloon Boy. Back in October 2009, the United States watched with bated breath as a helium balloon drifted over Fort Collins, Colorado. That's because a boy was said to be trapped inside the craft as it drifted up to 7,000 feet in the atmosphere. Almost instantly, the National Guard and area police responded, chasing the balloon until it landed in a field near Denver International Airport. Upon reaching the craft, however, police found no one. Only later in the day did authorities discover that 6-year-old Falcon had been hiding in the attic of his home the entire time.

As the day progressed into night, people began to suspect a hoax. This became particularly apparent after CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviewed the family. When Blitzer asked the boy why he hid, Falcon accidentally exposed the fabrication after saying to his father, "You guys said that, um, we did this for the show." Within three days, the Larimer County Sheriff's Office concluded the incident to be a hoax and brought felony charges against the parents Richard and Mayumi Heene. Less than a month later, both of them pled guilty to attempting to influence a public servant. For the crime, Richard was sentenced to 90 days in jail and was ordered to pay $36,000 in restitution. Mayumi received a 20-day sentence of weekend jail time.

Later, Richard claimed he only pleaded guilty out of fear that his wife would be deported. Remarkably, the family insisted the incident was not a hoax, which further muddied the waters. A motive was found in a signed affidavit suggesting they staged the incident to make the family "more marketable for future media interests." Motive mattered little, however, as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis pardoned the Heenes family in 2020, suggesting being scandalized in the public spotlight was punishment enough.

Long before social media created fog of war-type scenarios for factual information, hoaxes sprung up in news stories. Take the Amala and Kamala case, for example. In 1926, the rector of an orphanage near Calcutta, India published an account about two girls raised by wolves. He claimed to have rescued them from a wolf den, cared for them, and reintegrated them back into more human ways of living.

Thanks to his article in The Statesman, the rector seemed like a paragon of compassion and kindness. He reportedly spent years training the girls. Under his care, they progressed from eating raw meat and walking on their hind legs to learning basic human behaviors and functions. For years, this story circulated and made its way into various books, with next to no one questioning its veracity. That is, until, French surgeon and writer Serge Aroles researched the case.

According to him, the girls were real people, but the facts stopped there. The rector's diaries didn't line up timeline-wise and a doctor at the orphanage said the girls had none of the physical anomalies claimed in the initial story. Worse, numerous witnesses claimed to have seen the rector beating the girls to perform their wolf-like behavior for visitors. In the fallout, an anthropologist who collaborated on the original article was dismissed from his job at the University of Denver and never taught again. Eventually, other scholars came to agree with Aroles suggestion of a hoax.

Just last year, a nursing student named Carlee Russell made national headlines after becoming embroiled in a kidnapping hoax. The incident started when Russell made a 911 call. In it, she claimed to have stopped on the side of Interstate 459 because she saw a child wandering around the embankment. She then called a family member to report a similar story before losing contact. Upon reaching the scene, police found her car but no sign of Russell.

As hours turned into days, the story went viral on social media. In the process, Crime Stoppers raised $63,000 in reward money for finding her. However, 49 hours after her disappearance, Russell showed up unharmed at her parent's house. When questioned by police, she said a mysterious man kidnapped her and put her in a trailer. Though she managed to escape, he caught her again and blindfolded her. Somehow, she managed to escape once more. Regardless, police were suspicious of her story. Plus, her web searches leading up to the incident showed incriminating questions like "Do you have to pay for an Amber alert" and "How to take money from a register without being caught." Nine days after she reappeared, Russell admitted to the hoax through her attorney and apologized for wasting police resources.

Though she pled not guilty to charges of false reporting to law enforcement and falsely reporting an incident, a court found her guilty. Facing a year in jail, Russell later pled guilty to similar charges and received a suspended sentence and 12 months of probation. Be it a mental breakdown or simply for attention, it's hard to say what compelled Russell to make up a lost child and disappear under the auspices of a kidnapping.

(For real abduction cases, discover significant child kidnapping cases and their impact.)

In late May of 1828, authorities found a boy wandering the streets of Nuremberg, Germany. He had a letter from an anonymous author claiming he had cared for the boy for years but never let him out of his house. The boy, named in the letter as Kaspar Hauser, could only answer simple questions before devolving into hysterics. Unsure of his identity or what to do with him, police imprisoned him as a vagabond in Nuremberg Castle. There, he showed progress in terms of physical capabilities but seemed unable to answer any questions about his past. People assumed he was some kind of feral child. Eventually, the Nuremberg Mayor befriended the boy and gleaned more details about his life.

In these conversations, Hauser said he had spent his entire life in solitary confinement, waking up to fresh food each morning but never seeing another person. Later, a veiled man taught Hauser to walk and set him loose on the streets of Nuremberg. Naturally, the story caught the public imagination and made Hauser an object of much speculation. The city of Nuremberg later adopted him and allocated money for his education and care. During that time, however, Hauser received mysterious stabbing and pistol wounds at random intervals. From there, Hauser passed into the care of various nobles, including Lord Stanhope. These nobles attempted to uncover his identity but came away from the experience remarking on Hauser's penchant for excessive lying.

On December 14, 1833, Hauser received a brutal stab wound in his left breast. He claimed a mysterious man stabbed him and gave him a bag. Before more information could be confirmed, Hauser died of the wound. After his death, speculations and rumors ran wild. Some said Hauser was the hereditary prince of Baden and was thrown out into the streets to protect royal lineage. Some evidence, including DNA testing, pointed in this direction. Others, however, suggested the story was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Hauser. Due to its mystery, Hauser's story served as inspiration for countless novels and movies, including Werner Herzog's film "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser."

After Project Rescue Children was founded in 1997, the organization made headlines for its courageous rescues of women and children from human traffickers. Created by Adam Whittington, a former police officer, the firm initially helped find kids who went missing in custody battles. Later, it expanded its focus to include children enslaved in human trafficking rings. With a noble cause and endorsements from various celebrities, Project Rescue Children raised boatloads of money and earned millions of social media followers. In the process, Whittington claimed the organization rescued over 700 children in countries like The Gambia, Kenya, and Uganda.

The only problem, however, is most of their work turned out to be fake. A BBC investigation into the organization found that dozens of the children highlighted in PRC press materials were never trafficked. Furthermore, it found that a good portion of money donated to the organization never made it to children in need. During the investigation, BBC reporters traveled to Kenya. There, they discovered multiple families used in PRC press materials that had nothing to do with human trafficking. They also found one alleged rescue center published on the PRC website to be someone's house. Another time, Project Rescue Children recruited influencer Alex Betts to adopt a child from The Gambia. When Betts expressed concern over the organization's non-disclosure agreement, the PRC attacked her online.

Upon the BBC's publishing of its investigation, Project Rescue Children responded quickly. It claimed that the investigation was "completely without merit, misleading and defamatory." Despite the serious allegations, Project Rescue Children continues to exist and has doubled down on its child rescue aims. In the wake of the investigation, however, the Australian and Not-for-profits Commission revoked the PRC's charity status.

During the summer of 2020, claims regarding human trafficking advertisements hidden in Wayfair furniture catalogs went viral across social media. As the story goes, posts with screenshots of Wayfair products came to startling conclusions regarding items with exorbitant pricing and curious product names. With a superficial reading, it begged questions. Why was a simple cabinet being sold for thousands of dollars and why did its product name that of a missing child?

Over the following days, thousands of social media posts proliferated the conspiracy, making intense accusations against the Wayfair company. Forced to pause active investigations into real human trafficking cases, the Department of Homeland Security looked into the quickly-spreading conspiracy. Within days, however, each claim regarding Wayfair and human trafficking proved to be false. It turned out that quirks in Wayfair's algorithm resulted in ridiculous prices. To make matters worse, at least one of the names on the Wayfair cabinets, Samara Duplessis, was that of a real 13-year-old girl in Detroit. A boy from Maryland, 16-year-old Cameron Dziedzic, also found his name being used in the conspiracy.

Researchers later discovered the conspiracy came from a QAnon researcher named Amazing Polly. Upon being interviewed, Polly reiterated her belief in the conspiracy even after it proved to be untrue. Thanks to followers of QAnon, an online belief in a secret deep-state war between the government and Donald Trump, other false conspiracies like the Wayfair cabinets still occasionally go viral. However, it's the innocent people caught in the crossfire that suffer.

Some articles are so lurid and shocking they beget enough attention to win awards. Take "Jimmy's World," for example, an article published by Janet Cooke in a fall 1980 issue of The Washington Post. In the article, Cooke profiled an 8-year-old boy in Washington D.C., addicted to heroin. Due to its graphic, visceral depictions of a child injecting drugs, the article spread like wildfire and led to something of a publicity firestorm. After reading the article, D.C. Mayor Marion Berry and other officials organized a search for the young drug addict. The search, however, turned up no leads.

Meanwhile, some staff members at The Washington Post began questioning the story. For his part, assistant editor Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) defended the article and submitted it for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Thanks to his endorsement, Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize, one of the highest awards offered in the world of journalism. However, an Associated Press article regarding her win contained made-up biographical details. This led editors at another paper to report the discrepancies.

Slowly but surely, the inconsistencies mounted, and Cooke admitted that she lied about her biography. Though she initially stood by her article, on April 15, 1981, she admitted to making up the story completely and resigned from her position at The Washington Post. In the fallout, she married a diplomat and moved to Paris. Years later, she gave an interview to GQ magazine about the incident before selling the rights to the hoax for millions of dollars. The film project, however, never got off the ground.

Some hoaxes using children involve assumed identities. In 2011, 6-year-old Timmothy Pitzen was dropped off at school by his dad before being picked up by his mother shortly after. A few days later, police found the mother's body. Next to her was a note suggesting Timmothy was safe but would never be found. So begins a truly awful and tragic story about a little boy's fate and the unscrupulous actions of an opportunist.

Upon discovering the mother's body, police searched through phone records, surveillance videos, and other evidence to find traces of Pitzen. While some blood found in the mother's car was linked to Pitzen, other evidence suggested it wasn't from foul play. Whatever the case, Pitzen disappeared without a trace. For his part, the father believed the boy would be found alive somewhere out there. Save for a few leads gleaned through television programs about the case over the years, the search turned up empty.

A little less than eight years later, however, people found a teenager wandering the streets of Newport, Kentucky. When the police made contact with him, he claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen. Excitement gave way to disappointment, however, as the FBI quickly revealed the teenager was not Pitzen. Instead, he was 23-year-old Brian Michael Rini, a man recently released from a mental hospital. For the hoax, Rini received two years in prison.

In the burgeoning viral video scene of the late aughts, rappers garnered millions of views and just as many followers with braggadocious, ostentatious videos. In early 2018, an 11-year-old girl calling herself Lil Tay joined the fray. Thanks to pictures of her posing in front of luxury cars and rap videos featuring her singing about designer labels, Lil Tay became famous overnight.

Thanks to her growing popularity, Lil Tay's mother moved the family to Los Angeles for more entertainment opportunities. Over time, however, more information came out, revealing the complicated and dysfunctional family behind the viral star. Soon, Lil Tay's social media presence went dark. In the real world, however, her father was in a long-time dispute with her mother and half-brother. Occasionally, Lil Tay would appear to resurface on the internet. Instead, it turned out to be family members using her social media presence to make allegations against other family members, particularly her father.

In August 2023, Lil Tay resurfaced on social media when her Instagram went live after two years of silence. In its newest post, her page claimed that both Lil Tay and her half-brother were dead. This naturally ignited a viral firestorm, and media outlets reached out to her family as well as the police. Neither side, however, could confirm or deny the death allegations. Eventually, Lil Tay made an appearance in the press herself, claiming her page was hacked. Simultaneously, a TMZ report suggested Lil Tay's mother had won a custody battle for the young rapper. Within a few weeks, Lil Tay capitalized on the publicity and released a new song. It's hard to see the long and short of this hoax but whoever is behind Lil Tay's social media fame has played the media like a fiddle. (For real stories, discover the most famous kidnappings in American history.)