Web of Make Believe

Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet

A six-part anthology that traverses some examples of modern misinformation and digital deception. Each episode presents an example of how the Internet has been used to cause harm and commit crimes. The people involved in the cases tell their struggles, mistakes, and efforts to catch the perpetrators, and also how it affected their lives. After introducing the key characters in the case, the episodes explain how the Internet was used to commit the crimes.

Series

An online gamer makes a series of fraudulent emergency phone calls to lure police SWAT teams to innocent people’s homes. A practice known as swatting.

The murder of a political staffer spawns several right-wing conspiracy theories.

A woman tells the story of how she became a mouthpiece for white nationalist hate speech.

Several women recall their experiences of virtual blackmail, aimed at obtaining sensitive sexual material, known as sextortion.

Two hackers revisit their tax fraud schemes that caught law enforcement’s attention.

The FBI hunts the hacker, but he quickly turns the tables by contesting the legitimacy of a crucial instrument in their investigation, the Stingray phone tracker.