She came to the Christian Fellowship Group that I helped lead.

After the meeting, she told me she had leukemia and had only six months to live.

I believed her.

Why would anybody lie about something like that?

In the coming months, she would come to fellowship meetings with her leg in a brace.

She said she had a bone marrow aspiration from her femur.

She would miss a meeting and tell me she was in the hospital.

I would ask to come visit her, and she would tell me that I couldn't come because her chemotherapy made her immunocompromised.

This went on for months.

I noticed a pattern.

Every time I tried to visit her in the hospital, something would come up at the very last minute.

Eventually, little by little, other details stopped

fitting together. The whole story started to fall apart. I realized that this poor young woman was so

desperate for a certain kind of attention that she concocted this whole story as a way

to elicit compassion under terms that she could control. And I was taken in, and many of my

friends were taken in as well. Now, she carried on a kind of deception

with us, but we all know there are other con artists out there who are far more dangerous.

They swindle people out of their whole life savings. They create

Ponzi schemes that destroy hundreds of lives. They create economic crashes that make them

millions of dollars but plunge whole economies into recessions and depressions.

Con artists win elections. They start wars and lose wars, and people die.

Sometimes they become megachurch pastors or priests in a country parish. Sometimes they become cult leaders and people

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