Abstract
Deception regarding identity and biography are common but little commented upon features of contemporary life. Consider the following examples:
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In 1981 Robert Granberg went on a fishing boat with two other men. His companions reported that he fell into the ocean and disappeared. His wife then filed insurance claims for $6 million. In fact, he jumped overboard, swam ashore, and went to England. The four were eventually indicted.
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An engineer in New Jersey working alone set up a number of fictitious companies, obtained bank loans, and fed false information into a credit card service that one of his “companies” subscribed to. He created records for more than 300 nonexistent people and gave them impeccable credit records. He obtained more than 1,000 creditcards. He was able to operate for 4 years and spent $600,000 before he was stopped.
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Ferdinand Waldo Demara (whom Tony Curtis, aka Bernard Schwartz, pretended to be in the 1960 film The Great Imposter) passed himself off as a Royal Canadian Navy surgeon, a monk, a teacher, and an assistant warden of a Texas prison.
Looks are one thing and facts are another.
Herman Melville
Things are rarely what they seem.
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
Gilbert and Sullivan
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
Shakespeare
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Marx, G.T. (1990). Fraudulent Identification and Biography. In: New Directions in the Study of Justice, Law, and Social Control. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3608-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3608-0_7
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