If the people who know you — the people who have authority to validate your identity — recognize you and call you by your name, you are, in a practical social sense, that person.

Bourdin understood this.

He knew that if he could get the key validators — the family members — to accept him as Nicholas, the broader social infrastructure would fall into place.

Once Carey Gibson accepted him and brought him home, the social reality of “Nicholas is back” would be established and would generate its own momentum.

The specific technical vulnerabilities that allowed the deception to persist — the absence of biometric verification, the limitations of 1997 document systems — were significant, but they were secondary to the fundamental social dynamic.

The primary vulnerability was in human psychology, not in technology.