What’s the most insane lie that someone has doubled down on? – 17 massive fibs that were given the hard sell

Everyone’s bent the truth at least once in their life, either to get out of trouble or to make a story sound even more impressive.

However some people like to go further and conjure up tall tales that defy logic. To hear about these impressive lies, and the lengths people will go to to sell them, SometimesFacetious put the following question to r/AskReddit:

‘What’s the most INSANE lie someone has ever told you—one that was so ridiculously easy to fact-check that you could literally prove they were lying in 30 seconds, yet they STILL doubled down and swore they were telling the truth?’

If you can believe it, here are the top answers…

1.

‘Kid in my fourth grade class told us he invented Pokemon. This was in 1999, right after it came out. We pointed out that Pokemon was Japanese. He told us that he had recently been to Japan and had told someone his idea and that’s how it got made. Three of us got sent to the principal’s office for saying that clearly wasn’t true, which upset him. We were told it’s not nice to accuse someone of lying.’
-jmverlin

2.

‘I had a roommate who was a compulsive liar. One time he came home from the grocery store and was putting away his groceries and had a car tuning magazine, which I thought was weird because he wasn’t into that sort of thing at all. I said “oh, sweet! You bought a *insert magazine name here*! I want to read it after you are done!” He replied “Oh, no, my buddy gave me that magazine, I stopped by his place on the way to the store, but yeah you can read it!”

‘Then I saw the receipt on the counter and glanced down at it. It had the magazine listed on the receipt. That was just a day in the life with that particular roommate.’
-tannels

3.

‘Someone once repeated verbatim a story that I told them six months prior but they made themselves the main character’
-RancidVagYogurt1776

4.

‘That during college he did some scientific study in Antarctica, and that he had a close encounter with a polar bear there. I was like, wait a minute you’re a smart guy but we’re into computers, nothing to do with Antarctica, and more critically there are no polar bears in Antarctica. He claimed there was a small contingent of them there, after which I asked how they got there, by riding an iceberg from the Arctic all the way down? Of course yes, that’s how they got there.’
-fuzzycuffs

5.

‘When I was 10, my friend tried to sell me a Gameboy his dad had accidentally gifted him not knowing he already had one.

‘Except it was my Gameboy, with very specific stickers covering it, that I’d shown that friend two days before and had been stolen from my school locker later that day.’
-GracefulEase

6.

‘In high school, my mom and I moved out of our house that was falling apart. We took all our stuff other than trash. The fire department came and did a controlled burn to destroy it and to practice rescue scenarios. We then had a prefabricated house built on the existing foundation.

‘A girl who lived about a mile away, and who was in the same grade in the same school as me, told her friends that our house caught fire and that we had “lost everything” and were lucky to be alive.

‘I talked to her about it. She refused to believe me. My own house, that I lived in, and supposedly survived a fire in.

‘I eventually gave up and told her and her friends that she was right, except it was a very slow fire, and once we noticed it, we had about a week to save our belongings.’
-HawaiianShirtsOR

7.

‘I was in a writing workshop, and one of the participants submitted my story. Like… a story I’d already gotten published in an anthology. I mentioned it to her privately, because I didn’t want to start something that awkward in a group setting. She broke down crying, just the two of us, and accused me with no witnesses present of trying to steal her story. Then she went to the people running the workshop and told them I was going to falsely accuse her of plagiarism. They came to me, and I had to buy an ebook copy right there on my phone to show them it was my work. She had made no changes whatsoever except putting her name on it. The workshop runners were completely baffled by the sheer lunatic audacity of it all. I told them I suspected that she was legitimately insane. She showed up to the following session with a different story that a cursory Google search revealed was also plagiarized.’
-12b6ThatNoise

8.

‘Back when we were engaged and lived on different continents, my parents paid for my now ex-husband to fly out to visit me. My mother asked about the food on the plane. He said there was no food served. On an 8+ hour international flight. My mother asked if he was sure, maybe he slept through the meal services? Ex insisted nope, he was awake for the entire flight, and no food was served, other passengers were confused about it, too!

‘My mother called the airline to complain, and of course my ex was bullshitting. The airline was even able to tell her which meals and snacks, plural, he was served.

‘Just the dumbest fucking most pointless lie, and a huge red flag I wish I’d seen.’
-acover4422

9.

‘One of my childhood best friends told me she got brain cancer back in 2011. When I checked in on her a couple of months later, she said that she had been given this new experimental pill and it cured the brain cancer.’
-throwdown60