A Sucker Born Every Minute

April's Mom. Such a touching story. Such an enormous Internet hoax.

Beccah Beushausen might be in training to be a novelist. Or a huckster. Sure there's a sucker born every minute, and she attracted them with her touching tale of a difficult pregnancy which she blogged about on a regular basis. The toast of the anti-abortion crowd, but it was all a sick game.

Sorry, she says now that she's been rumbled. It's just that her own wee little boy died four years ago and the blog helped her deal with the pain and she's very much against abortion and isn't a blog a great place to vent such strong feelings?

It was a doll that did her in. To add realism to her blog, she posted pictures of the supposed mother and supposed baby, but baby was a doll and one of her loyal followers recognized the toy.

From there, the word spread with the speed of electrons that the whole thing was a scam, and some techno-savvy readers managed to track down her true identity and expose her.

Others who fell for the whole story believe that Ms. Beushausen was chasing numbers. She promoted her site and even admitted that she was dazzled by the growing number of hits. It translates into the amount of attention her writings received, and she couldn't seem to get enough attention.

Poor woman ended up in hospital, made ill by the stress of being found out. She's planning to make a full confession on her blog, and then she can sit back and wait for a book deal.

Anyone who could craft such believable fiction is bound to attract some literary agent's eye.