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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

When you impersonate someone, you don't have to fool everyone, you only have to fool your mark. No one else is likely to know or care what you're doing.

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You think in a small town if someone's mom died and they started pretending to be her and pretending their dad is their husband people wouldn't think that was weird and talk about it?

At first you just "pretend" to the taxman. You only start pretending publicly when all the people who could confound you are dead.

It is worthy of note that until she was in a nursing home, at a claimed age of 110, "Jeanne Calment" avoided any publicity about her claimed age. For example she refused the local mayor's congratulations when she "turned 100" - instead newspapers wound up running a story about someone turning 95.

She literally waited nearly 50 years after the claimed switch, after she was in a new environment, with new people, without the people who would have most easily challenged it, to publicize her claim. This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.

Search for "Publicity (lack of)" in https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 for more details on that.

> This is exactly what we would expect from someone who was trying to hide a fraud.

It's also perfectly reasonable to not want to be made a spectacle of. And to reconsider later. Maybe she didn't think 100 was worthy of spectacle, but 110 was; maybe 10 years or missing out on spectacle drove her to change her mind.

Yes, every piece of evidence can fit with switch or no switch. But the evidence is not equally likely under those theories. Therefore when I try to combine evidence I find that switch makes a lot more sense to me.

But many people who were younger then her remember her during that time period that you say she was only pretending for the taxman. All of these claims are coming from people who live in another country and never did any investigatory field work in the area. Everyone who actually did the interviews and on the ground investigation came to the conclusion that there was no swap, and that the alleged swap wouldn't have made any sense.

Purely speculating for entertainment, but the switch could have started it for the reason of obtaining benefits, and not a thing shared with others, by the time she got to be old enough to be famous for it, had been going on for so long nobody cared or was alive at the time to remember maybe?

We have records of the daughters funeral in the towns newspapers. It was well attended and there was a viewing of the body afterward. Many people would have had to have been fooled/in on it from the very beginning.

The records dont confirm that there was a open casque viewing, but if there was, how recognisable is a mother vs her daughter if she just died of tuberculosis? In fact the funeral was very fast. She was buried the day after she died.

No, but they might think it was pension fraud and be unwilling to report their neighbors (even posthumously).

That seems unlikely, but we only have the one case of someone living that old vs many cases of unreported pension fraud so if we're assigning a prior to both I would say it's reasonable to assign a probability of pension fraud to be at least as high as the probability of her being truly that age.

First off the allegation isn't pension fraud, it's inheritance tax dodging. Or sometimes it's claims about tuberculosis that don't make sense. Secondly as I have said the whole swap thing has been investigated by multiple people, all who came to the conclusion that no swap took place. Furthermore since the people saying it was a swap are the ones making a claim and have literally 0 evidence, at a certain point you just have to accept that a woman lived slightly longer then anyone else.

Small towns have a more closed circle form of gossip

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