7 CELEBRITY IDENTIFY THIEF VICTIMS

Will Smith
Photograph: WENN.com

When you go to the multiplex this weekend, you may want to pay with cash. Keep your personal info stowed away — there is an Identity Thief about.

Typically, identity theft is not what we would call great comedic fodder. Anyone who has been the victim of this invasive crime knows how detrimental it can be. While it is uncertain whether the actors in Seth Gordon’s film have ever experienced this grave misfortune, if you have ever had your identity stolen, you may take solace in the fact that plenty of celebrities can commiserate.

Will Smith

In 2009, Smith was irate to find that several false accounts had been opened in his name. A forty-five-year-old con artist used the name William C. Smith, full name of the rapper-turned-actor, to charge more than $33,000 in fraudulent debt. The craziest part of this particularly story is that when this thief was arrested for stealing Big Will’s identity, he was on parole for committing the same crime against former Atlanta Hawks basketball player Steve Smith. There’s no need to argue, the parole board just don’t understand.

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Steven Spielberg

Spielberg is world-renowned as a legendary dream weaver, but in the mid-1990’s, he experienced a rather nightmarish invasion of his privacy. An inmate of a Tennessee prison used nothing but a telephone and some devious wit to obtain all of Spielberg’s personal information. While he didn’t steal anything from the filmmaker, he did use the info to keep eerie tabs on everything Spielberg bought on his American Express card. Jackson would later supply this information to the head of a Hollywood studio, hoping to secure a movie deal. And you thought the pale, dying E.T. was unsettling.

Tiger Woods

Pro golfer Woods found out the hard way that perhaps the security measures surrounding his personal information were frighteningly subpar. Career criminal Anthony Lemar Taylor got a hold of Woods’ info and used it to illicitly purchase more than $50,000 in goods and services. Not only that, but Taylor somehow obtained a fake drivers license, social security card, and even a military identification card, all in Woods’ name. He may have looked nothing like Tiger, and actually got his middle name wrong on the falsified documents, but Taylor amassed an entire storage unit full of ill-gotten merchandise.