The internet lets you be weirdly fictional without necessarily being dishonest.
You can use a fake name. You can have an anime PFP. You can build a character around being mysterious, rich-looking, permanently online, clinically early to everything, or some combination of all four.
That is not automatically fraud.
It is also not automatically honest.
This is where people get lazy with the word LARP because it can describe a huge range of behaviour, from harmless persona-building all the way to somebody inventing material facts so strangers send them money.
Those things should not be treated as the same category just because both involve pretending.
A useful practical line is intent plus consequence.
If the fiction is part of presentation, entertainment, privacy, roleplay, aesthetics, world-building or a pseudonymous identity, the audience can often engage with the character without needing the fictional parts to be literally true.
An anonymous account called 0xCocaineHorse is not making a legal-name claim just by existing.
A meme page can post like a deranged hedge-fund manager without anybody reasonably needing to believe it controls a nine-figure fund.
A creator can stage a scene, use a prop, edit an image or build a fictional universe around an account.
The problem changes when the invented part becomes a material reason somebody is expected to trust you, send money, buy something, invest, hand over credentials or make some other consequential decision.
That is where "it's just a LARP" stops being a very useful defence.
If somebody says they are a billionaire as part of an absurd internet character, that is one thing.
If they claim to be a billionaire because they are selling access to the exact strategy that supposedly made them one, now the claim is doing work.
If somebody posts a fake private-jet photo because their account is basically a parody of crypto wealth culture, fine, whatever.
If they use the same photo to convince people they manage a fund and should be trusted with deposits, completely different situation.
Same image. Different function.
That distinction matters more than whether something is technically "fake."
The internet is full of fake things that everybody understands are fake.
Filters are fake. Movie sets are fake. Brand photography is staged. Pseudonyms are not legal names. Game avatars are not human bodies. A lot of entertainment depends on the audience happily accepting a constructed reality.
Deception becomes dangerous when the audience's mistaken belief is the mechanism.
That is the part people sometimes pretend not to understand.
There is also a spectrum before you get to obvious scams.
Selective screenshots are a good example.
Posting one winning trade and not mentioning twenty losing trades is not the same thing as fabricating a wallet balance. But if the selective picture is used to create the impression of a repeatable track record so people pay for advice, the ethical problem gets much bigger.
Same with social proof.
Making a new account look visually complete is normal branding.
Buying fake testimonials from people who never used the product is not just "making the brand feel established." You have invented evidence about other people's experience.
Again, the fake thing is doing transactional work.
That phrase is probably the easiest test I have found.
Is the fiction just part of the character, or is the fiction being used as proof?
Proof of wealth.
Proof of returns.
Proof of credentials.
Proof of customers.
Proof of access.
Proof that somebody else already trusted you.
Once fabricated proof is being used to overcome another person's hesitation, the LARP has moved into much uglier territory.
There is another test that is even simpler: would the other person still make the same decision if they knew which parts were invented?
If the answer is obviously no, you probably know what is happening.
None of this means internet personas need to become painfully literal.
Anonymous culture would be unbearable if every PFP account had to add a disclaimer under every joke explaining that the frog does not actually own a family office.
Context exists. Reasonable people understand performance.
But ambiguity is not magic. You cannot build a false factual story specifically to obtain somebody's money and then retroactively call the whole thing performance art when they complain.
That is not edgy internet culture.
That is just using aesthetics as camouflage.