Males that pretend to be Female.

What are your views on this subject?

I don't understand how someone could pretend to be the opposite sex online. How could you enjoy it and get satisfaction out of lying to everyone about who you are. I came up with the following theories:

• They are ashamed of who they are in real life, and want to hide their identity, to the extreme.
• They want to flirt with boys/men online, and are gay, but are too ashamed to admit it.
• They are interested in 'Role Playing', and play the role of a female under whatever name they pick. They can invent their entire life and a whole new person, and nobody would know whether it was true or not.

I've met two people in the past who have turned out to be who they haven't said they are. One was a 16 year old girl named 'Ashley' who turned out to really be a 12 year old girl named 'Queenie', the other was more recent and pretended to be a girl named 'Justine' aged 19, who turned out to be male, aged 19? and called 'Aidan'

It took over a year and a half for anyone to realise Justine was really male. They conjoured up the following things to hide their identity:

• Creating a fake PayPal
• Using pictures of his cousin as his own.
• Having so called 'IRL' acquaintances to back up his story.
• A fake bank account as a form of ID, or a edited HTML page of a online banking login.
• Voice manipulation programs on Skype, to sound more female.

Knowing all these things that people can pull off is really quite scary, how many people you know could be lying about who they are? The only real forms of identification for me are:

• A picture, with a timestamp of them holding a message of your choosing.
• A webcam and mic session, at the same time so you can see them talking to avoid them using a video off the internet.

I feel this person has some serious RL issues they need to talk about with someone, and to get them sorted.