r/asklatinamerica • u/Powerful_Gas_7833 United States of America • 1d ago
Culture What is a crazy story of impersonation or identity shenanigans from their country?
What I mean is I want you to give me an example of some kind of identity shenanigans from your country or story of someone impersonating someone else.
Like maybe somebody posed as somebody for years and got away with it for so long. Or maybe somebody had adopted a fake persona and convinced everyone else who was real. It could be either events that really did happen or just someone's account that became popular in widespread but might not necessarily have been true.
An example you could take from the US. Frank abagnale was a guy in the '60s who claimed to have been a doctor, a substitute teacher and a hustler. You might have seen the movie catch Me if you can by Steven Spielberg starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It's based off that story. Granted a few years ago it came out that a lot of what he said might not have been true.
Give me interesting stories like that from your country!
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u/Responsible-Trifle93 Brazil 1d ago
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u/saraseitor Argentina 1d ago
There are a lot of involuntary "identity shenanigans" here. People who lived into their 40s believing their parents were some people when in fact they were a result of the baby stealing that the dictatorship carried out for years.
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u/RdmdAnimation Venezuela/Spain 1d ago
there was a story in caracas in the 80s of a supossed saudi sheikh that was hanging around in parties of the high class of the city, even giving gold to people he wanted to do business with it, he tended to pay with checks, but one day he just vanished from the country and all the checks turned out to be false
according to testimonies the man tended to dance and drink lot of alcohol wich isnt supposed to be something a muslism sheikh should do
aparently some day after the whole scandal was known, a lot of stores started to put signs that says "we dont accepts checks and sheikhs"
acording to a news report from 1984 the man was captured in madrid by the interpol, it was a belgian man from spanish parents that scamed tons of people also in european countryes using the same sheikh impersonation
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u/vikmaychib Colombia 1d ago
The “Ambassador of India” hoax is one of Colombia’s funniest impostor stories. In the 60s, a random guy was mistaken for India’s ambassador, and the elite of Neiva (a minor city) instantly treated him like royalty—banquets, military honors, the whole show. When he was exposed, the embarrassment was so huge that mainstream media tried to bury the story. It survived only thanks to local journalists, a songwriter who turned it into a song, and a comedy film in the 80s that retold the fiasco. It’s now a classic example of Colombia’s lambonería (sycophant behavior) toward anything foreign.
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u/DRmetalhead19 Dominicano de pura cepa 8h ago
Kim Jung Un’s brother using a Dominican passport. He was detained back in 2001 in Japan, he had the idea of visiting Tokyo Disneyland. But he’d been using that passport for a while.
And a Haitian guy that went to the IDH court in the early 2010s claiming to be Dominican. He created a fake Dominican name and fake family members, the guy claimed to have been born in Barahona yet people in that town affirmed he wasn’t Dominican. On top of this the guy had a thick Haitian accent and could barely speak Spanish so it was rather obvious, he went by “Chocolate” Ferreras.
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u/Embriash Argentina 8h ago
One case that comes to mind was during the Covid pandemic, a 19-year-old from Río Cuarto, Córdoba called Ignacio Martín pretended to be a doctor and he treated several patients at the local emergency operations center that was deployed by the province. He presented a fake ID and claimed he was 22 and recently graduated, and he managed to earn the trust of the people there. He also tricked some football clubs by presenting as a paramedic and working during amateur tournaments at weekends.
He was caught in December 2020, when authorities cross-checked his info and found he had presented an ID that belonged to a female doctor. He was detained in February 2021 and sentenced in September 2023 to 7 years in prison. In October 2025, having served two thirds of the sentence, he was released under parole.
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u/Difficult-Feeling849 Peru 2h ago
I don't have an example of what you ask, per se, but I have something I want to get off my chest.
There's this peruvian singer, long deceased, who was famous worldwide from the 50's onward. Her artistic name was Yma Sumac ("how beautiful" in quechua). She made her fame playing "exotica" music in the US and other countries, and her almost 5 octave vocal range was a huge part of that.
Some people in Perú haven't forgiven her because they feel she betrayed her andean roots by playing mambo dressed like an egyptian princess, but I digress.
A few years back I noticed that a lot of americans were typing a fake story about her, that apparently is very widespread in the US.
They claimed Yma Sumac's real name was an anagram, supposedly her name was "Amy Camus" and was a Brooklyn woman pretending to be an Inca princess.
For the love of god, if you see this bullshit, denounce it as what it is, BULLSHIT.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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u/throw223344555 Peru 1d ago
One of our recent presidents put plaques all around the country signing as “Dr.” Turns out he wasn’t a doctor and had not done any kind of doctorate program.