Christophe Rocancourt grew up in Normandy, the son of a prostitute and an alcoholic house painter, and spent his childhood partly in an orphanage. In the United States in the 1990s he became, variously, a Rockefeller, a nephew of Dino De Laurentiis, a relative of Van Gogh, a boxing promoter, a venture capitalist and a film producer.
His technique was not documentary. He carried almost nothing that could be checked and did not need to, because what he was manufacturing was position in a network.
The sequence works like this. Obtain one photograph with a recognizable person — easy at an event, a charity function, a party. Use the photograph and the implied acquaintance to secure an introduction to someone adjacent. Be introduced by that person to the next, and by then the question of who you are has been answered by whoever brought you. Each introduction transfers a little of the introducer's credibility, and nobody in the chain performs a check, because everyone assumes the check was performed upstream.
This is the sociology of weak ties operating as a security failure. In an ordinary social network the assumption that a mutual acquaintance vouches for a stranger is efficient and usually correct. A person who is deliberately traversing the network extracts trust at every hop without ever supplying a source for it.
His targets are the second half of the mechanism, and Rocancourt selected them precisely.
Wealthy people in Los Angeles, the Hamptons and later Whistler, for whom access to a Rockefeller was a positional good. Festinger's social comparison work explains why a mark of high status may apply a lower evidentiary standard than an ordinary person would: the association itself confers something, and a person who is enjoying being upgraded is not motivated to investigate the upgrade. Asking a Rockefeller for documentation would also be a status error — it would reveal that you did not know how such things are done.
He also worked through romantic and sexual relationships, which accelerated everything. The trust literature, including Kosfeld's oxytocin work, is contested in its details but the behavioral finding is not: intimacy substantially reduces betrayal aversion and the disposition to verify.
He was arrested in Canada in 2001, extradited, and pleaded guilty in 2003 to charges including theft, smuggling and perjury, serving time in the United States. Estimates of his takings run to tens of millions. He returned to France and became a minor celebrity, publishing books.
The defensive point is a specific and practical one. An introduction is not a reference. When someone arrives vouched for by a person you trust, the question worth asking is what your friend actually knows about them — and the usual answer, traced back two or three hops, is that somebody else introduced them.