urbanMSP

To Wells! by grant.simons, on Flickr

Perhaps Rick's mother willed him some land adjacent to the Rochester airport.

Yeah, so it goes back to Minnescraper, and RB is a real person who maybe had some peripheral involvement in financing and probably knew some actual people and knew some actual stuff. He's got a lot of big ideas, but not enough money or connections to turn them into anything, and now he's retired and feels out of the loop. He posts on Minnescraper, and he likes the fact that people pay attention to him and he feels important.

Then, on UrbanMSP, some people question what he knows, and he takes umbrage at that.

So, he shifts over to SSC and decides to make up a new character that will prove that he's important and knows what he's talking about and has a lot of money. It's not unreasonable that you'd take a little time (20 random posts isn't much) to establish some baseline credibility for the person that's going to talk you up. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that he originally had plans to post as much as he did, or to create Ryan or the other characters. But he found that he really enjoyed the attention, and he got sucked in.

It would seem that the creation of all of the LinkedIn accounts would be the point in time when he doubled down on building this into a full blown hoax. Not sure how that timing corresponds to the other posts.

The other connection that would be interesting to dig into is the Rochester connection to Gus Chafoulias that Derek M mentioned, and June confirmed. Assuming that Derek M is another sock puppet, this might be the only real, potentially verifiable connection that was noted. It would be interesting to try to find a copy of the Regional Impact study that he apparently did for the Rochester Airport -- a quick google search doesn't reveal anything. You'd like to think that the Rochester newspaper would have done some fact checking before letting a guy have a featured opinion piece.

Someone should tip off Ira Glass. Sounds like an episode of This American life.

I think all of this should be forwarded to WCCO or KARE. There is obviously a systemic problem with LinkedIn and fake profiles. I've been a member of Linked In for many years and I can't find any way or reporting "bad" links. This could be a national story.

I think all of this should be forwarded to WCCO or KARE. There is obviously a systemic problem with LinkedIn and fake profiles. I've been a member of Linked In for many years and I can't find any way or reporting "bad" links. This could be a national story.

oh dear lord, people online making fake profiles and pretending to be people they are not? I think your right, national story if not world wide breaking news!

Every time I jump back into this, I become more and more convinced there's something more sinister at play here than fooling forumers. Here's a profile I dug up in the fake ring of profiles: "Samuel Horowitz," a private investor from NYC. This isn't a character that ever popped up on SSC (as far as I know) but the person took the time to write up a bio and have a number of other profiles endorse him. Think of the time it took to assemble all of these! Hundreds of fake emails, bios, pictures, work histories, recommendations... remarkable. I can't believe it was all just to trick people online.

By the way, this is one of the few so far that I've been able to track down where the photo was lifted from. "Samuel Horowitz" is in reality Bill Barry, a broker out of Oregon.