A prankster recently visited a mall in America with one goal in mind: to trick shoppers into thinking he was a famous celebrity, called Thomas Elliot. Within minutes he had a crowd following him, mall security guards for protection, and even had entire stores close so he could shop in private!

Along with the help of a few planted actors from Chill Hill Media, Elliot (whose name is actually Thomas Cramer — his middle name is Elliot) entered MacArthur Center Mall in Norfolk, Virginia with the intention of tricking everyone into believing he was a celebrity. And according to him, it only took four minutes to do so:

It just so happened to catch wind so early — a gentleman had asked for a picture not knowing who I was and then the security witnessed it. I think the security coming to aid was one of the biggest facilitators of it, just because it drew so much attention.

Mall-goers pegged Thomas Elliot as a character from The Hunger Games, Spiderman and even Titanic — all of which Cramer says neither he nor his team came up with. The idea to collect tweets came after the experiment. Although Cramer claims this was a case study and a social experiment, he says first and foremost he just wanted to accomplish a really cool project.

See a video of the excitement below – would you have fallen for it?

[Thanks, Craig!]