Following is a comment left at http://rfinfo.wordpress.com/who-is-the-original-rfinfo/
If only I had found this sooner hahaha!
I wont go into too much detail (It takes about half an hour to tell this story outloud and I've done that about 10,000 times since this happened!)
I met Ryan outside a hostel in Paris in the spring of 2007. He claimed he saved children from the sex trade in south-east asia (which naturally captured everyone's interest since there's no WAY anyone would/could lie about something like THAT right?). We stayed in the same room, ate breakfast together, went to bars, cooked meals and after several days of hanging out constantly (I was fascinated by this guy, everyone was) his story about saving children, earning his money from playing pool/starting a magazine/knowing things about 'hedge funds'/his LivingLegends website, his dealings with Burma (thats right) only added to how stupid we all felt in hindsight. Every question you could possibly ask this guy, no matter how deep, was quickly, calmly and intelligently answered.
(lookinging back on it, Ryan is most likely some boarding school kid who flipped out, ran away from home and has lived off a combination of poor, sweet, gullable fools and daddy's credit card)
He eventually got busted when I asked him about the 'hedge funds' thing again in front of a guy called Sean that actually worked in trading. I was taken to one side and explained how everything he just said was bullshit, the 'stab wound' in his arm is identcal to Sean's (often they insert a plate after a breakage from, say, a snowboarding accident) and that I probably shouldn't go to Thailand with him in 4 days time like we were about to...
Sean basically saved my fucking life. That night, Ryan crept into Sean's room (we never found out what he was gonna do) Sean wakes up, causes a scene, hostel manager comes in and asks "who the fuck are you? you're not a paying guest, etc.." (turns out that first night I met him he was just waiting for me to go back to my room to sleep so he could let himself in, claim a bunk and free brekfast for the next 3 days). Ryan being Ryan, he managed to persuade the French hostel manager to let him stay the night until he could clear everything up (flee) in the morning. Gotta love that British charm.
It looked particularly dodgy when it turned out he he had no passport (which always made me wonder about the Thailand thing) refused to have his picture taken EVER (he claimed he was just shy the whole time) and the 'book' he claimed to be writing turned out to be a text book on south-east asia (hence how he knew everything about the geography of burma/history of thailand/etc, etc).
Next moring, me and the girl who had be hanging out of him woke up, I retrieved the 50 Euros I lent to him (thats right, the "minimum donation to help the kids" he wont mention over the internet), I took my coat back that I lent him (he was living out of a t-shirt), we calmly walked out of the hostel, told him we'd be right back, turned the corner and got the FUCK out of there. We literally ran 300 yards to the metro coz at this point nobody knew if he was dangerous or not.
I had to spend an extra 3 nights in Paris just trying to digest what just happened. I cant stress this enough: I'm not stupid, it only looks that way when I tell it back like this, at the time EVERYONE believed him. I later learned that if you ever wanna fool somebody into believeing anything you say, tell the biggest lie first: tell someone you save children from the sex trade and they'll choose to believe you or not, if they do (coz of course, what kind of psycho would LIE) anything you say after that just seems...logical.
Ryan is a far more effective con-artist in person than online.
I spent months trying to track him down over the net, but after just a couple of run-ins on couchsurfing.com I gave up (his white-orchid site wasn't displaying my questions) until I typed his name into google and found this site randomly today.
Feel free to post this if you think it'll help the next poor sod avoid to him. I hope you expose this guy until he has nowhere left to hide.
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