have you met many of them? i mean, perhaps some people oversell themselves, some might even tell outright lies -- but this guy fabricated entire identities.
i'd like to think that this is not exactly commonplace.
but if it really is, then this kind of thing more common in the tech industry, or does pretty much everything with a "business" angle attract a few people like this?
I can only imagine this kind of behaviour evolves from a deep and intense fear of survival, also associated with reward from positive interactions with others. If people get away with this behaviour when they're young and it "is helpful" to them as a coping mechanism, then it'll follow them into adulthood. The people who are successful enough at it will be able to gain resources and relationships, at least for long enough to keep perpetuating the behaviours, and they won't stay in one area for long - this is the only way they could maintain succeeding with this kind of behaviour. You can have sociopath who doesn't lie though, too. It's just when you combine it with someone who feels they're getting away with lying, then they'll see how much they can get away with.
These people, if they're to be behaving this way successfully, are very intelligent - very sensitive people to begin with. I've always thought they'd be able to be very successful if they were honest and kind in their dealings, however this makes me feel/realize like it really must be something traumatic that occurred for this behaviour to take hold; Fear of survival is a fucker, and I can sympathize with the possibility of this as a coping mechanism. Basically imagine a lost, lonely, terrified child - emotional state/maturity wise - and how that "child" may behave in order to have connection, relation with others.
To answer your question finally, business is basically where people can network easily, where people are open to relationship building. It's where there are resources available too, and so someone who's seeking relationships and has fear of survival - needing to pay for food, shelter, etc - will naturally more likely lead into a business environment.
To add as final, I don't believe they have the intent to be hurtful or harming - it's just what their past hurt that hasn't been healed, that's directing their logical behaviour; They may not understand this either or fully realize to the degree it's influencing them because it will have been deeply repressed emotion. Also, people will be at different levels of awareness and healing - and could be more aware - but still stuck in the behaviours that they know work for them (at least in the short-term), and may just need a situation and role to find where they don't need to use these coping mechanisms. Though I can imagine too that's a tricky situation too because they won't any longer have the incentive to need to change, but just to change enough to find something that causes less threats, e.g. continuously being found out as a liar, betraying people, breaking trust, etc..
For an example, here in the UK the chairman of the current ruling party used fake identities to run his dodgy web marketing/scraping/consulting business and most people in the UK startup scene didn't think there was much wrong with what he did. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/21/grant-shapps...
>Grant Shapps, the Conservative party chairman, posed as a "multimillion-dollar web marketer" named Michael Green who spoke to reveal the secrets of his trade at a $3,000-a-head internet conference in Las Vegas while he was the Tory party candidate for Welwyn Hatfield.
>The pictorial evidence of his double life, revealed online by a fellow conference speaker, will pile pressure on Shapps to explain his links to a network of websites which have been blocked by Google for breaching its rules on copyright infringement and encouraging customers to plagiarise content.
>But at the age of 35, Shapps claimed already to have established "the world's largest internet marketing forum". A few years later while a member of the shadow cabinet, he also had time to run phone lines where for $297 an hour Green would give tips to aspiring entrepreneurs.
>Casting himself as an internet marketing guru with products and coaching services guaranteed to generate income, Shapps owned and ran until 2008 a series of websites making claims that still dog him despite attempts to downplay his personal role. Using the website MichaelGreenConsulting.com, which operated from 2004 until it was removed from the internet in 2009, Shapps claimed to run the "world's largest internet marketing forum" with his company How To Corp.
For example, corporations and election campaigns are well-known to deploy scores of false identity sock puppet accounts across social networks in order to create a false "grass roots" following.
