An impostor is someone who deceives or lies by presenting something false as true. Generally the concept is used to name the individual who pretends to be someone who, in reality, he or she is not .
The impostor therefore adopts a false identity . The usual thing is that someone who pretends to be another person does so with the aim of obtaining an economic return or a social benefit from this trick.
For example: "He introduced himself as an inspector from the Department of Food Science but he was an impostor: he ended up robbing the restaurant" , "An impostor posed as a cousin of the groom to access the wedding" , "The police discovered that the impostor was pretending to be "passing as a physiotherapist to abuse his victims."
Let's imagine that a young man poses as a volunteer firefighter . Presenting himself in this way, he goes around the houses to request financial aid that, according to him, will contribute to improving the functioning of the city barracks. Since this is an impostor, the money will not actually reach the real firefighters, but will allow him to get rich. This conduct, of course, constitutes a crime: the imposter is a fraudster .
Another individual, meanwhile, may try to enter the hotel where the FC Barcelona players are staying by stating that he is the son of a club leader. His goal: to be able to meet Lionel Messi and take a photo with him. This impostor does not intend to obtain financial gain from his lie, but rather to enter a place closed to the public to fulfill his dream.
Nowadays, the idea of identity theft on the Internet is increasingly common, a phenomenon that can deprive us of one of our most precious rights: our privacy . However, the figure of the impostor is far from belonging to modernity, but is as old as the world itself. Whether in fiction or reality, there are countless stories of individuals who impersonate others who are quite popular.
Among the impostors whose stories have resonated most throughout history are Franziska Schanzkowska , who falsely claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and Victor Lustig , a man who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower itself to five millionaires.
The term impostor has several synonyms, among which we can mention the following: faker, deceiver, double, impersonator, simulator, slanderer, gossiper, slanderer, cheater, false, charlatan, liar and swindler . Dictionaries provide us with many options to qualify the central idea of someone who deceived others, allowing us to approach different vertices of the concept.
If we simply take the word impersonator , for example, we can use it to replace impostor in various contexts with complete peace of mind since the dictionary defines it as "someone who takes the place of another person with bad tricks , defrauding their employment, their favor or their right." «. Something similar we can obtain by using fake or double .
But in the list of synonyms we find other less extreme ones, such as being a liar : although it goes without saying that an impostor is in principle someone who fails to tell the truth , in this case it is important to point out how he does it, and with liar we do not give him the interlocutor with a sufficient amount of information to understand it.
On the other hand, there are words like cheater or swindler , which seem to be closer to the consequences of their actions than the previous ones: although they make it clear that the individual they refer to uses different tactics to deceive others, they give us an idea. clearer of the suffering of their victims than impostor , since they make us think of "the trap they fell into" or "the scam they suffered."