The boy who appeared in Berlin last September saying he had been living in the forest was identified as Dutch on Friday following the release of photos by the German police.

He was identified as the 20-year-old Robin van Helsum by former pupils at his school in Hengelo. They recognised him from the Berlin police photos published on Thursday in the Telegraaf.

The ‘forest boy’ emerged in the German capital on September 5 last year and told authorities he had been living in the forest with his father since the death of his mother in a car accident five years previously. When his father died, the boy said he buried him in the forest and then walked to Berlin.

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Interesting. I somehow failed to see this story when it first came out. There are some similarities to the Kaspar Hauser case aren’t there? That was also a possible hoax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser
Similarly, the articles you’ve put up mention the relatively recent case with Andreas Grassl, a German born man who turned up, identity unknown and seemingly unable to speak in Sheerness, Kent in England, and then there’s the similar case of Sywald Skeid, a Romanian who turned up, again unidentified, apparently having been assaulted and seemingly with amnesia, in Toronto, Ontario in Canada.  Of course there are also large numbers of other sad cases in every country where a person feels the need to vanish, cutting off all ties with their previous life, but I suppose the remarkable thing here is that these people did make themselves known to the public, but did either did it with their identity seemingly unknown or with a false and dramatic backstory. I wonder what’s behind it?

The internet has made a swift and quiet disappearance virtually impossible.

“We got ya, back to the office on Monday. Oh and btw you are being charged for fraud. Pay up little man!”