Four Incredibly Brazen Identity Thieves
It takes a certain kind of personality to decide you deserve to be someone more than they do. As a result, such people tend to swing their massive balls wide enough to hit themselves in the face and get brought down by their own shameless gall. Like when…
An Anonymous Scammer Tried to Sell Graceland
In 2024, actress Riley Keough received a letter purported to be from a company called Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC claiming that her late mother, Lisa-Marie Presley, had taken out a loan with them prior to her death, putting up Graceland, the real estate shrine to Keough’s grandfather, as collateral. Keough obviously ignored the letter, so “Naussany” put Graceland up for auction. It was hilariously easy for Keough to stop the sale, and in a response to an email from the New York Times to the address listed on the legal paperwork, someone claiming to represent the company immediately admitted to the fraud, commending Keough for “beat(ing) me at my own game.”
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We had to double-check that Keough didn’t have any upcoming roles as a security expert for which this might be a publicity stunt, because that would make more sense.
Thomas Parkin Stole All of His Mother’s Identity
After Parkin’s mother died in 2003, he wanted to keep cashing her Social Security checks to keep up with the payments on her Brooklyn brownstone, so he began wearing a blonde wig and large sunglasses and using a walker whenever “Mom” needed to run official errands. This actually worked for several years — he even renewed her driver’s license — until he went to the police, as his mom, claiming the new owners of the brownstone were there illegally. No one tell Adam Sandler about this story.
McKenzie Francois Called the Police to Get His Evidence Back
Parkin wasn’t the only scammer who tried to use the police. In 2013, Francois hopped on a plane to Fort Lauderdale but left his wallet behind at the Tallahassee airport, where an airline manager discovered his 13 debit cards in different names. They turned it into the police, who cross-referenced airport records to find its owner, but they needn’t have bothered because Francois called them from Fort Lauderdale looking for his wallet. You know, the one containing all the evidence of his crimes. It turned out he was running a huge tax fraud scheme encompassing hundreds of thousands of dollars, proving no amount of money can make people keep track of their shit.
Charles Stopford Was the ‘Earl’ of ‘Buckingham’
In 1983, young Anglophile Stopford left America for England, assuming the identity of Christopher Edward Buckingham, a real Briton who died in infancy. He then took it a step further and started claiming to be the Earl of Buckingham, even though there hadn’t been one of those for more than 300 years. This worked for more than two decades, despite the extreme fussiness of the British about their earls, because it was just super easy to fake an identity back then. By 2005, technology had caught up, and a border official identified Stopford as, unequivocally, not a dead baby.
Let this be a lesson to any budding scammers: Always steal from a living baby.