subject: Impostor Types, Cases And Prevention Methods. [print this page] We can often hear the stories about people going on the wild side about their identity. As kids we all played roles of firefighters, policemen, military, doctors and other. Vast majority of people either decide to take one of these professions as their career, outgrow the kids play or do something else.
There are some individuals though who for some reason dont become doctors or cops but want to be them so hard that they decide to impersonate those professions. When it comes to fake cops many of impostors are police academy rejects, often participants of voluntary local security programs organized by sheriffs office or local police. Usually they dont hesitate to spend the money. For example David Brian Webb, 35 years old resident of Livingston, Texas was arrested on February 9th for impersonating a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. He had it all, the uniform, the custom id badge, even a fully equipped Dodge Charger with siren, radar, camera and all tinted windows, just like police interceptor vehicle.
Police reports hardly ever describe the motivation for the crime. While we can be sure its very strong motivation as these people not only spend significant amounts of money for uniform and equipment but also risk serious jail sentence. I think some of the impostors might actually be people of low self esteem looking respect from their victims if victim is the right word here. Webb was caught by real cop when he pulled him over to ask him to fasten his seatbelt; as far as I know nobody was hurt by Webb while on duty.
In Florida 17 years old Matthew Scheidt was arrested last September for impersonating a physician assistant in a hospital. He was seeing the patients and had access to sensitive data for 6 days before he got busted. He had an custom id badge from the hospital as he was previously working there as a billing clerk and managed to fool HR to issue him a replacement ID for physician assistant.
The popular culture impostor king is Frank William Abagnale, Jr., real figure portrayed in Steven Spielberg movie Catch me if you can starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. He had really wide area of interest including medicine, law and airline industry.
Naturally the biggest group of impostors consists of people who pretend they someone else for their personal benefit. They usually target elderly or disabled people acting as utility company personnel or social workers, their cover is hardly ever sophisticated, no identification, no uniform.
The same category would cover impostors and often organized crime groups targeting non English speaking minorities in the United States. The individual often act as immigration attorneys or people who have connections at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Lots of victims gave tons of money to people promising legal residence in the US.
Both government and non government institutions often run campaigns to warn against impostors. Also local and regional media play an important role in raising awareness against con artists.
