Films and docs about identity fraud worth watching

There is a surprisingly rich body of film and documentary content that covers identity fraud, document forgery, and the cat-and-mouse history of authentication. Here are the ones I found genuinely informative rather than sensationalized.

Documentaries

The Imposter (2012) is a documentary about Frédéric Bourdin, who impersonated a missing American teenager to a degree that fooled his own family. The film explores how identity fraud succeeds through social engineering rather than perfect document replication — the documents were not particularly sophisticated, but the human acceptance of identity was.

Identity Thief (the news documentary, not the comedy film) — various investigative journalism documentaries on this topic air through BBC, Channel 4, and US networks periodically and are worth searching for. The best ones show actual forensic examination processes.

Narrative films with accurate security content

Catch Me If You Can (2002) is entertaining but Abagnale's claims have been extensively disputed. Treat it as entertainment, not documentation. The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) has a better-researched look at document and security system psychology, though it is about art theft rather than ID specifically.

Technical reading

For actual technical content, the annual proceedings of the International Holography Manufacturers Association and the Keesing Reference Systems publications on document security are more accurate than any film or documentary. These are industry publications written by security printing professionals. Some are accessible online; others require library database access. Less entertaining than a documentary but the information quality is incomparably higher.

The academic literature on document security and identity fraud is more technically detailed than any popular media treatment. Journal papers from security conferences like IEEE S&P and academic publications on document forensics cover the technical specifics of genuine versus reproduced security features with far more precision than documentaries aimed at general audiences. For serious research into how identity documents work and how verification failures occur, the academic sources are incomparably more accurate and current.