The French Con Man Who Fooled The FBI — How A 23-Year-Old Impersonated A Missing Texas Boy And Lived With His Family For Months
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), established in 1984, had institutionalized the infrastructure for tracking and publicizing missing children cases.
By 1997, the culture around missing children had certain established narratives and institutional responses that Bourdin was able to work with.
He knew how to contact the right organizations — NCMEC — in a way that would route him toward the family of a specific missing child.
He knew that the narrative of a trafficked child who had escaped was one that the culture had frameworks for receiving and responding to.
The institutional response to a supposedly returned missing child in 1997 was not primarily skeptical.
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