A story that's relevant to this topic...
A couple years ago there was a female student at the college I coach at who we would see running all the time. She was not on the XC team but it was clear that she had talent. The spring of her junior year we (some of the men's team members and I) saw her around the athletic center one day and got to talking about running, trying to convince her to come out for XC her senior year. During this conversation she claimed to have done many marathons; multiple Bostons, NYCs, Chicagos. She claimed to have run something like 3:15. So of course the first thing we did after the end of that conversation was find a computer and look for her results on marathonguide.com. Guess what we found-NOTHING. We tried different spellings of her name, no results! Ok, maybe we found 1 result or something like that, but no way were there 8-9 results in big marathons for this woman like she claimed. So that kind of became the big joke among us for awhile whenever anyone would talk about getting ready for a marathon; "don't forget to register".
Turned out she did come out for XC the next fall and ran great. Plus she was a real team leader, great to be around, a real breath of fresh air in our women's program. Right after she graduated she ran the local marathon in around 3:40 and now she's under 3:20. So she's definitely legit but it just seemed so odd that we could never find results for all those races she said she did.
The weird thing is that we still get a call or an email from her every once in awhile. Half the time she tells us about some race she did and we can't find her name in the results. We are convinced that she enters races under a fake name. Maybe it's like those people who do restaurant reviews and have to write under an assumed name.