In my experience a couple of really good freelance gigs can be enough to cause all of these problems. The problem is there aren't enough hours in the day and so if a project starts getting behind you work at it harder, forego things like marketing yourself (because you can't commit anyway to anyone else) and pretty soon your presence is down. It's a painful lesson and I have been through it. When you combine this with a sluggish economy, what might have been a moderately painful lesson before can be quite devastating.

I do, however, agree with the recommendation to talk to other freelancers, etc because this really helps with the learning curves of this sort.

You can find some background if you read through the comments. It's reasonable to not want to have your history right up at the top.

There are also things in the appeal that make this sound legit, in particular the part about running out of money working at startups. Sure an outsider could figure this out and make a false appeal (like is often done on reddit) but they usually aren't that clever.

It can happen, I've done it myself. It's not that difficult, especially when you live paycheck to paycheck, your rent is high and you don't have savings.

It's all too easy unfortunately.