"Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do."

You can still do that today although agreed it is much harder. You could simply buy someone's company for example with a history and claim that is where you were (and modify the website with the appropriate collateral.) You can fairly quickly setup a linked in profile and get lots of contacts of people in any industry that you don't even know (source: I get people writing to me wanting to be a linked in contact constantly as I'm sure most people do.)

There are people that actually have an inventory of old websites that have been around since the 90's (and domains registered back then) representing a wide range of industries.

That said this is not as easy and of course if someone does a really through vetting much will be uncovered. But how often is that done?