Oh wow I assumed he was anonymous. So his LinkedIn says he's done a lot of web development gigs. He's had a GitHub account for 15 years but hasn't shared any projects and there's lot of suspicious activity in previous years. His X account allegedly has 11k followers but his timeline gets almost no engagement.
Now are you ready for the smoking gun?
He told a nearly identical story on Hacker News back in July and managed to raise $765.