Skip to footer

Fake identities: Manti Te'o scandal and 6 other Internet hoaxes

6. The San Roman family ruse

Jake Turcotte/CSMonitor
While only some Internet hoaxes are exposed, it seems that they are common on the Web. The perpetrators behind them often assume fake identities and trick people into believing the elaborate stories and characters they create.

  • By Steph Solis

The San Roman family made hoax history when it was exposed as fake in July 2012. The person behind the fake Facebook accounts and the family's blog about three children battling cancer was 28-year-old Cindy Choi, of Miami, Fla.

Choi, owner of the Doral restaurant chain in Miami, wrote about Kevin, Lucas, and little cousin Katy San Roman in the blog and often posed as one of the San Roman brothers, according to the Miami Herald. She had several online relationships with teenage girls who believed she was either Kevin or Lucas San Roman.

The blog, titled “Kevin and Katy’s Cancer Journey,” goes back as far as 2009. It gave vivid details of the San Roman children’s medical records and treatment.

To hundreds of Facebook friends, the San Roman brothers were two South Miami boys with cancer. They had several online girlfriends who texted the boys, talked over the phone, and planned to meet in person.

The San Roman brothers’ plans, however, kept falling through. After Kevin’s cancer entered remission in mid-2011, he claimed he had to return to Spain because of a visa mix-up. Kevin was expected to return in June, but he died of “cancer-related complications” two days before his supposed flight.  

One of Kevin San Roman’s Facebook friends, Kaitlin Masters, befriended Lucas after sending him condolences. Ms. Masters, a high school senior at the time, consoled him while he claimed to be in Tennessee for his cousin’s treatment and when “little Katy” died, the Herald reported. They also video chatted, but Lucas San Roman claimed his webcam was broken.

Masters’ family pressured Lucas about using a different video chatting program. The next day, a young woman who claimed to be Kevin San Roman’s girlfriend called Kaitlin and told her that Lucas had suffered a seizure in Spain. It was then that they learned that Lucas and Kevin had the same phone number.

Masters got Miami-Dade prosecutors involved, who traced the San Roman family back to Ms. Choi.

Choi told Masters she created the San Roman story because she was confused about her sexual identity and that she was trying to help some of the girls she encountered, as some had relatives with cancer, the Herald reported.

6 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.