Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: CHAT ROOM RIVALRY GETS TAKEN OFFLINE

by Hazed

If there's one thing I dread, it's when the line between things that happen in the game and things that happen in real life gets blurred, and players allow their disputes to cross from the real to the virtual world, or vice versa. Whether it's a couple that break up in real life and then start squabbling in Fed, or an argument about some economic issue in Fed that somebody tries to continue outside the game, it's going to cause problems.

But nothing like the problems that resulted from an online love triangle, which involved deception, betrayal and ultimately murder. Thomas Montgomery of Cheektowaga, New York, has just been sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting and killing Brian Barrett.

It all started when Montgomery, who is 48 years old, pretended to be an 18 year old Marine in online chats with an 18 year old student. Except that the student was pretending, too - she was really a middle-aged West Virginia mother called Mary Sheiler. Clearly, she'd never heard the phrase about the pot calling the kettle black, because when she found out that Montgomery had been deceiving her, she dumped him and instead started a new online romance with Barrett - who really was 22, and seems to be the only one in this sordid affair that wasn't telling lies.

Montgomery was not happy, in fact he decided in the usual obsessive, stalkerish way, to make the two of them suffer - and the method he chose was to kill Barrett. Well, that would do it!

So apart from the moral about "what happens online, stays online", the other moral is to beware when you pretend to be someone you are not!

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