The fraud interpretation holds that Hauser was a young man — probably from an ordinary background, possibly a minor criminal or habitual liar — who conceived or stumbled into a false persona that attracted patronage and attention beyond anything he had previously experienced. The story of the cell was fabricated. The wounds were self-inflicted. The behavior that seemed consistent with extreme childhood deprivation was performance. The entire five-year episode was, in this view, an extended and ultimately fatal con.
The evidence in support of this interpretation is real. The inconsistencies noted by multiple guardians and investigators were genuine. Feuerbach himself, who had championed Hauser publicly, wrote in private correspondence that called Hauser a “smart scheming codger” — an assessment that suggests his own views were more complicated than his public writings indicated. Stanhope’s post-death publication laid out specific instances in which Hauser’s behavior seemed inconsistent with genuine naivete. The wounds, particularly the December 1833 stab wound, had features — the folded note, the characteristic spelling errors — that investigators found suspicious.
The evidence against the fraud interpretation is also real. The physiological details of Hauser’s initial appearance — the smooth soles of his feet, the absence of calluses, the apparent inability to tolerate smells that most people process without difficulty, the genuine confusion about ordinary objects — are difficult to fake consistently. Feuerbach’s own carefully argued 1832 report, whatever his private doubts in correspondence, made a serious case that some genuine crime had been committed against Hauser’s developmental history.
A middle position — that Hauser had genuinely experienced some early deprivation but embellished its nature and severity for the audience that patronage required — has been advanced by some researchers as the most evidence-consistent account. This position does not require Hauser to have been entirely lying or entirely telling the truth, but to have been doing what many people in precarious positions do: managing a story to maintain support.