Warning, this is a true crime podcast and is not suitable for all audiences. Please use discretion.

Are you too trusting? Believing people is something most of us want to do. The thought of someone

lying to us, especially about something important, feels like such a betrayal.

And if we are lied to about something serious, something deadly serious, when does it become a crime?

I'm Naomi Channel and this is real. You know, Casey Nicole Swenson was an active internet user.

She was a teenage girl living in Midwest America,

and in 1998, her internet presence, along with the accessibility of the internet, began to grow.

Photos of her showed a beautiful blonde 19-year-old, a very wide smile and always dressed in trendy

clothes. She'd started writing for a website called college club.com. It was a web space for students

across the world to meet, come together in chat, to share their experiences, to access email

and post items for sale. It was launched in 1996 and it had around 3 million active users. For context,

MySpace launched in 2003. So collegeclub.com really was one of the first social media sites

available for people to use. Casey Nicole was a basketball player for her school team in Kansas,

and she would often write about the games that she played.

She was outgoing and chatty,

which meant that other users easily became friends with her.

She even became friends with some of the staff on the website. She would go out of her way to volunteer to do some of the site's administration work.

The New York Times reached out to her to do an interview. They'd seen her volunteering and using the space online, and so she was interviewed over the phone by a journalist

about her plans for her future. But in the year 2000, Casey was talking to one of her online friends,

a man named Randall Van de Wanning. He lived in Hong Kong, and she told him that she'd been

living with leukemia.

She said she was in remission, but her friend was shocked.

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