There is an art to lying, but if the person being lied to doesn’t have a reason to think they are being deceived, one might get away with it. But, for better or worse, some liars embrace the idea of going big and going home.

Someone asked “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?” and netizens shared their most unhinged stories. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote the worst offenders and be sure to add your own examples to the comments below.

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.

"You gotta send me a new phone, bro, I'm in the Marines and mine broke!" "Semper fi, brother, which unit are you with?" "The 6th" "Uhhh regiment? Divison?" "Division" "You sure about that?" "Yes, of course!" "Yeah... so... they disbanded that one in like 1946" And then he hung up.

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 that day.

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 were 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.

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.

Someone told me they invented a word. A real word. In the dictionary. Looked it up in front of them in 10 seconds. Still insisted the dictionary was wrong.