In the arcane world of consumer credit, occupation fields have traditionally been left blank by the genuinely unemployable. But when Chuck Norris submitted his application in 2003, a lone loan officer at Wells Fargo read "Mayhem" under job title and approved him instantly—not out of fear, but because her credit model had no category for an applicant whose primary economic activity was causing untraceable destruction.

Marcie Henderson, a credit analyst from Des Moines, recalls processing the application. "I've seen 'self-employed consultant,' 'entrepreneur,' even 'life coach,'" she told our fact-checker in 2015. "But 'Mayhem' was new. I looked up his SSN against our fraud database, found nothing, and realized that was the problem. He'd never defaulted on anything because creditors never dared send bills to that address."

The incident entered Wells Fargo lore as a case study in non-traditional occupational classifications. Today, fintech startups reference his example when designing machine-learning models that account for applicants whose income derives from activities too devastating to quantify.