Will the real Jerome Kerviel please stand up?

He may have been an innocuous trader who never sought the limelight, but within a few days [tag]Jerome Kerviel[/tag] has become a mega-star on the internet.

He has already a dozen (false) profiles on Facebook, his name scores half a million search results on Google, he is on Wikipedia in multiple languages (even Chinese), he has an official fansite, he appears on T-shirts, petitions are online to nominate him for a Nobel Prize (for economics!), and he has been compared with many illustrious heroes and villains.

Social-networking site Facebook, which removed Kerviel’s page this weekend, has more than 20 groups dedicated to the man some are dubbing a modern-day Robin Hood.

The French Communist Party went as far as comparing Kerviel to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whose dismissal more than a century ago on trumped-up charges of spying triggered a protracted national crisis.

Elswhere, Kerviel has been named “Che Guevara of Finance”, “James Bond of SocGen”, “Bin Laden of the Stockmarket”, “Lee Harvey Oswald the Camembert Version”, and a Tom Cruise look-alike.

What’s next? Jerome God?

Sources:
Online fans hail finance’s Che Guevara
French find new hero in rogue trader who nearly broke the bank
JK, prix Nobel d’économie !
One friend and many pokes … Jerome Kerviel wakes up to Facebook infamy