Hoaxes attract the young.
Chatterton, the marvellous boy, was seventeen when he wrote Thomas Rowley's works for him. William Henry Ireland, who in 1976 gave the world a new and dreadful Shakespeare play called Vortigern , was nineteen. All the principal players in the Ern Malley saga were in their twenties. Harris was twenty-three, the same age as Demidenko. Perhaps you have to be that young to believe in imaginary worlds bigger than mere writing, more interesting than your own life - and to be so heedless of the consequences.