Reading Lynette Silver's Marcel Caux: A Life Unravelled (Milton: Wiley 2005), an account of Harold Katte's reinvention of himself as Frenchman Marcel Caux after unpleasantness on active service in the 1914-18 War.
Katte successfully adopted a new identity on return from the Western Front, conning the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy for about eighty years and having his second life 'unravel' at the age of around 100 when he was discovered to be one of the 'last diggers' (and hence appropriated by politicians and the 'repatriation industry'.
Katte/Caux had served in the trenches and is thus unlike impostors who've claimed financial benefits, military honours or merely public esteem to which they were not entitled ... often on an egregiously implausible basis.
One example was 'Major' Reg Newton, former junior vice-president of the 8th Division Association in Australia, who claimed a Military Cross and bar ("awarded ... for heavy action Laos"), service as a secret agent during the Cold War (setting up escape lines in East Germany in 1951, almost killed in Mongolia and wounded in Korea) and decoration by King George VI. Evidence emerged in 2006 that he was never a major, had not been awarded the Military Cross and indeed had never served overseas. Newton reportedly told acquaintances there were no records of his exploits and honours because his work was "top secret". Uh huh.
UK fantasist Alan McIlwraith was more inventive. He claimed to be Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith, CBE, DSO, MC, MiD: war hero, officer in the Parachute Regiment, top of his class at Sandhurst, an advisor to Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Wesley Clark and a terrorism expert who had served in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. On exposure he blamed his fictions on "being hit on the head with a scaffolding pole by a gang of youths in the street". More recently he has been reported as having passed himself off at Strathclyde University as a millionaire property developer and charity worker, supposedly harvesting personal information such as National Insurance numbers from credulous students.
