This leads to obvious mistakes in identification, which can be emotionally damaging and cause many questions to arise about ones own self-identity. A clue to this may be given by individual responses given by those who were conned by a New York psychiatrist referred to as Alex when he created his own 'cyber-babe' personality, Joan. Alex created Joan with the intentions of doing research on how wom en socialize. Yet over the course of time he was using the Joan persona, Alex engaged in relationships with both men and women through Joan and used Joan to introduce him to at least one woman with whom he entered into a physical sexual relationship. These examples show that the effects of deceptions and errors in judgement can have devastating emotional effects.
Deception can also include such physical mediums as being conned out of money.
It is probably so east to deceive people because the indiv iduals who met Julia or Joan ignored obvious clues that both were not who they claimed to be. Here we see that the individual had some reservations about Joan's identity, yet her assumptions and biases towards handicapped individuals kept her from voicing or acting upon her suspicions. In general the cyber community frowns upon such activiti es but there is really no way to effectively monitor or ban an individual from participation in a M.U.D., M.O.O., I.R.C., or other cyber community. The combination of anonymity and lack of accountability have resulted in many outrageous expressions of self over the internet. The most prolifically studied of these behaviors is 'flaming'.