There are people in the world who have the gift of bulls*%t – but there are also people out there who are able to see through it in a heartbeat.

If you struggle with knowing when someone is full of it, here are some folks who swear everyone has a tell.

It’s all a distraction.

They insult you when you are trying to clarify something with them

They try to avoid the question and suddenly start confronting YOU instead, and thats when you know they dont like you and have been bullshitting you from the start

Spontaneous extra details.

I had a mythomaniac ex-boyfriend 18 years ago. I learned to recognize a lie when he spontaneously gave unnecessary details that each time relate to an element of our life or something that I had spoken to him about shortly before :

Yes I collected the mail, I opened the mailbox around 3 p.m. but it was only ads so I threw them away, there was the catalog of such and such supermarket and the program of the town festival. (He hadn’t picked up the mail. I had just told him a few days before that I was waiting for the program of the village festival. I was disappointed that he threw it away, but, amazing! We got it in the mailbox a few days later! They must have sent it twice?)

I don’t know why the electricity is off! Yet I paid, I sent the check last Tuesday, I even went to drop it off at the post office so that it would arrive faster, did you know the teller at the post office is pregnant ? (we had our electricity cut off because he had not paid, and I was pregnant)

No I was at work, I talked to my colleague Benjamin, he told me about his daughter who is 8 months old and has eczema, Benjamin even wrote me down the name of a cream that he advises me (We had a baby who had eczema, and my unemployed ex claimed to have started a new job while spending his days smoking pot in the woods. He was pretending everyday to go to work and had taken the business card of a random salesman named Benjamin, on which he had himself written the name of some eczema cream he saw on TV).

He would know.

Only lies have details – Sherlock Holmes

You shouldn’t have to say it.

“You can trust me.”

I work with a guy that says “know what I mean” after lies. He thinks he has everyone convinced that we all know what he means.

I can assure you that it’s not convincing.

Duper’s delight.

They look at you like you’re a joke afterwards – the ol’ “dupers delight”

Every last time.

“Ain’t going to lie to you…”. You’re about to be lied to.

As fast as you can.

“I’m the kind of person who …”

If you hear that, run.

This one cracked me up.

They enter the ER with something up their arse.

“This would be more believable if Safeway sold their sauce bottles with condoms already attached”

Full stop.

They’re running for office.

The change in pitch.

It is super easy to tell when my mom lies. She gets super defensive and her voice turns high pitched.

Sometime she just starts yelling if you are completely straight faced

No silver bullet.

There’s no silver bullet for detecting falsehood. Eye contact, posture, speech patterns…. these all vary widely in people’s communication and relying on any single one, or even a combination as a foolproof lie detector is going to both false positives and false negatives.

Things you can look for: 1. context, why is this person telling me this thing in this setting. Do they have motivation to lie to me?

2. Delivery, eye contact, posture, speech patterns, once again these are not silver bullets but they can work as a sort of smell test. If you know the person, does the current communication match their normal style? Are they acting like someone would generally act in this context. Could be they are just awkward, or they could be lying.

3. Internal coherence, does the thing they are telling me make sense, seem plausible, does the timeline work, any obvious holes, do the details shift around?

4. The someone, you should be more willing to trust people who you have been honest with you in the past. If someone has lied to you previously, well guess what. Do you know of times when they have lied to others? Criminal or past history of heavy drug use or addictive behavior, never trust a junkie.

5. One of the big ones and probably the closest to a silver bullet, do they try to guilt you or get aggressive when pressed for verification or asked for additional confirming details.

If it’s your money, your safety, your time on the line and they don’t like you double checking. Well f**k’em, even if they are telling the truth still fuck’em.

It’s always a bit up the air and good liars are hard to spot. Keep your eyes open and wallet in your pocket until you can be sure.

They’re buying time.

The ask the question you just asked back to you.

“Are you really a doctor?”

“Am I really a doctor?”

Definitely not a doctor.

Show don’t tell.

Sports related: The more quickly they tell you how great they were at a sport, the less likely that it is true. I used to do a lot of running.

Many times people that I met found out that I was a runner and almost immediately told some bullshit story about their running accomplishments.

The very good runners that I have known rarely, if ever, talk about their running accomplishments.

Nothing is foolproof.

Five things come to mind, they’re not as simple as “they smile when they try to fool you” or anything, though if you observe someone long enough you can pick up on certain tells, as a rule though body language isn’t as easy as “they looked left they’re lying”

Well the first one is easy they say something that you know to be false.

The second is less obvious, every story they tell is about how awesome or what a good person they are. Nobody is that awesome and nobody who is such a good person feels the need to brag about it.

The third is something I’m basing on a couple of specific people, after they tell you a story, you hear them tell the same story to someone else but it’s more exaggerated, there’s probably a kernel of truth in it but by the last person it’s more fantasy than reality. Who knows what it was before it got to you. As a corollary when you hear similar fantastical details from one story pop up in various others, that’s usually a fantasy that they add in.

The fourth is something I think we all pick up on intuitively, when there’s always a convenient excuse as to why it’s not their fault, maybe one time you were out drinking and missed work the next day due to an ankle injury, but every time?

The fifth is linked a bit to the third, if you hear them lie to someone else, they are likely lying to you. Lying is like Pringles, once you pop you can’t stop. For whatever reason they lie to someone else, to get out of doing something, to aggrandize themselves, to spare their feelings, to get out of trouble, they will lie to you for as well.

There is a secret sixth but it’s less tell tale and more feelings based. There is a way that some people who are borderline pathological with their lies speak that immediately makes me suspicious of any detail they say. It’s hard to explain. It’s been common in multiple consistent liars I’ve met, that’s not to say all liars talk like this, more like anyone who talks like this has been a liar. It’s almost like they structure their sentences in an unnatural way that feels like they’re testing the waters, seeing if you believe them before they continue down the rabbit hole.

I don’t think I can do it justice, especially without tone but it goes vaguely like this: (a) useless proposition. “You know the McDonalds on Main? Of course you know it they’re just trying to engage you; nothing sinister yet.

So you say yeah (b) “you’re never gonna believe what happened” or “it was so crazy” something vague to build anticipation but also to see if you’re willing to hear this fantasy that they’ve concocted.

(c) optional second useless proposition “have you seen so-and-so who works there?” Or something similarly seemingly pointless, this person may work there and the storyteller is trying to figure out if you’d sniff out the lie before committing or this person may not even exist.

(d) fantastical lie “I was at the McDonald’s and the unbelievably hot cashier (so-and-so) stopped me, and gave me an extra burger with her number on the wrapper and she told me I’m cute, I called her when she got off and we went to a hotel…”

This is a real lie I was told by a coworker this week, very much truncated and cleaned up. I knew it was going to be a lie before the lie itself came. The reality was there’s a somewhat pretty cashier at that McDonald’s, and he has some delusion that every woman wants him. It’s not unique to him there are a dozen or so people I’ve known who lie in a very similar way, sorta like how children “lie” where they get excited about make-believe.

A classic for a reason.

When it sounds to good to be true, it’s most probably not true.

The old turn-about.

Gets defensive.

And starts insinuating you are guilty of what they are the actual one doing. Using a lot of “you always” and “all the time” when you request even one specific circumstance.

It gets really sad when they are deluded into believing they are diabolical and you insist it’s not the least bit convincing although it all hinges in their mind that you are an idiot, even when it’s well established you are smarter and they are deceitful.

Gaslighting.

They gaslight you into being afraid to ask them questions. They will say crap like “why don’t you trust me, why do I have to prove every small thing”.

These all seem legit ways to sus out a faker.

It’s worth a try, anyway.