Bourdin inserting himself into that system and receiving the care and attention it was designed to provide.

In some cases he used real missing children’s identities, as in the Barclay case.

In others he simply invented personas — fictional teenagers with fictional histories — that were never tested against any real person’s documented life.

The career of deception spanning from his teenage years through his thirties represents an extraordinary sustained project of identity fraud, one that carried enormous personal risk (prison sentences, deportation) and produced genuine psychological costs alongside the temporary psychological benefits he sought.

The Chameleon — the nickname that has attached to him — is apt.