When you are in a chat room, belong to an email discussion list, or for that matter, read a blog, you cannot be certain all of the time the other person is who they are representing themselves to be, and on some occasions, they are frauds with evil intent.

When it comes to blogs in the cancer community, given time in reading the blog, I have found most people are who they say they are -- but when it comes to chat rooms, there is a higher probability that the identity of the participant could be different than the person is in real life.

In Leeds Today, a news story has been published exposing a pervert who pretended to be a boy named Ricky with cancer, for the purposes of luring a teenage girl into a sexual encounter. Ricky was really a 45-year-old married man named Glen Marwood. But the 17-year-old girl believed his chat room story and began to offer emotional support and encouragement as Ricky went through cancer treatment. She became attached to Ricky and felt the relationship was developing romantically. Which is what Marwood was hoping and had planned.

When Marwood persuaded the girl to send pictures of herself via a webcam but didn't reciprocate with the same, he told her he was embarrassed by his hair loss from chemotherapy. At some point, Marwood decided to inform the girl that Ricky had died. He then showed up at her family home in Leeds on behalf of Ricky with gifts from the deceased Ricky. When Marwood showed up in person, the rest of the family wasn't so sure about Marwood and contacted authorities.

Police investigated, and Marwood admitted pretending to be a boy with cancer named Ricky. According to investigators, "He said he went on the internet to escape from an unhappy marriage and describing what he wanted to do sexually to the girl."

You cannot go through life being suspicious about everyone new you meet, or you might miss out on some great friendships. But when it comes to the internet, you cannot blindly assume the person sitting in front of the keyboard out there is anything close to who they say there are -- and caution is the rule. It is a good thing that this 17-year-old girl had a family that went with gut instinct and contacted the police before a sexual predator managed to do her harm.