1971 drama
Paper Man is a 1971 American television film transmitted as one of the "Friday Night Movies" which CBS-TV was then including in its prime-time programming. It was directed by Walter Grauman, dramatized for television by James D. Buchanan and Ronald Austin, both of whom were working from a story written by Anthony Wilson, and produced by Richard N. Gladstein. It starred Dean Stockwell, Stefanie Powers, James Stacy, James Olson, Elliott Street, and Tina Chen.
Four college students (Stefanie Powers, James Stacy, Elliott Street, and Tina Chen) take advantage of a credit card mistakenly issued to someone who does not even exist by using their university's computer to counterfeit an entire identity and erase the charges they run up on it - done by Avery (Dean Stockwell), a computer wiz to fix everything for them. None of them count on the computer seeming to have some ideas of its own, or on it commencing to murder them.
Ultimately, a man employed at the university (James Olson) proves to have stolen the identity which the students had counterfeited and to have been using it to commit the offenses which the students had blamed on the computer.
Paper Man was produced at a time when identity theft was neither as common a crime, nor as difficult to commit, as it later became.