This Is the Hoaxer Behind Fake Uber Lawsuit

When a bizarre lawsuit supposedly filed by accused Kalamazoo shooter Jason Dalton made headlines this week, police pretty quickly declared it a hoax. After all, it came from Philadelphia, and Dalton is jailed in Michigan. So if it wasn't Dalton, then who impersonated him? The Smoking Gun has the answer: It's a frequent inmate and notorious hoaxer by the name of Jonathan Lee Riches. "A TSG examination of the phony Dalton complaint reveals that the handwriting on the document is identical to that seen on numerous prior hoax lawsuits filed across the country by Riches, whose escapades have been chronicled in these pages for a decade," the site notes. (See the document here.)

Riches himself cops to it on his Facebook page, writing Friday morning, "I sued as the Uber cab shooter, glad I spoofed the jerk!" Riches is currently serving the remaining weeks of his conviction on wire fraud charges at a halfway home in (ta-da!) Philadelphia, notes TSG. He's kept himself busy over the years filing literally thousands of lawsuits—including one earlier this year against a Pennsylvania couple who won the Powerball lottery, claiming somehow to be entitled to half their money, reports Forbes. But perhaps his most notorious stunt came in 2012, when he posed as the uncle of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza in Connecticut and was promptly arrested. That violation of parole (he wasn't allowed to leave Pennsylvania's Eastern District without approval) got him sent back to jail. (More hoax stories.)