SUPER FRAUD: Frank Abagnale on the Death of the Con Artist and the Rise of Cybercrime

“What I did was almost 50 years ago and it’s about 4,000 times easier today to con people than when I did it.”

Back in March, 2013, Wired UK‘s Olivia Solon talked to Frank Abagnale — a former conman and the subject of 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can — about fraud, cybercrime and security.

[Frank’s legendary book, on which the movie is based, is available at Amazon]

Frank Abagnale’s early life story has been told many times. A former conman who specialised in impersonation and forgery, he was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can. His story has also been told as a book, a musical and is drawn upon in TV series White Collar.

“When I did the things I did, I did them all between 16 and 21. I’m 64 years old now. When I did it I made $2.5m over a period of five years. If I was stealing identities today, I’d be looking at more like $20 million, or $50 million”

At the age of 16, Abagnale posed as a pilot for Pan Am Airlines in order to wangle free flights. He later pretended to be a doctor, before masquerading as an attorney — just some of the eight different identities Abagnale claims to have assumed. Throughout this time he became a master forger of cheques, defrauding banks of millions of pounds.

[Check out Catch Me If You Can (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition) at Amazon]

He was arrested at the age of 21 in France and spent six months in prison there, six months in a Swedish jail and was then deported to the US (not before he’d escaped from the aeroplane intended to transport him). After serving five years of his 12-year sentence, he was paroled on the condition that he helped the FBI uncover cheque forgers. He has since made a career as a security consultant, working closely with the FBI for almost 40 years, and launching his own company Abagnale & Associates.

[Check out Frank’s book “Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan” at Amazon.com]

Abagnale talked to Wired UK about his past life as a conman, identity theft, the criminal opportunities made possible by the web and the efforts made by governments to fight cybercrime.

How would the technology available today have affected your ability to con people in your early years?

What I did was almost 50 years ago and it’s about 4,000 times easier today to con people than when I did it. To forge a cheque 50 years ago, you needed a Heidelberg printed press, you had to be a skilled printer, know how to do colour separations, negatives, type-setting… those presses were 90 feet long and 18 feet high. There was a lot of work involved in creating a cheque. Today, you open a laptop. If you are going to forge a British Airways cheque, you go to their website, capture the corporate logo and put it in the top right corner. You then put a jet taking off in the background and make a really fancy four-colour cheque in 15 minutes on your computer. You then go down to an office supply store, buy security cheque paper and put it in your colour printer.

Fifty years ago, information was hard to come by. When you created a cheque you had no way of knowing where in reality British Airways’ bank was, who was authorised to sign their cheques and you didn’t know their account number. Today you can call any corporation in the world and tell them you are getting ready to wire them money and they will tell you the bank, the wiring number, the account number. You can then ask for a copy of the annual report and on page three are the signatures of the chairman of the board, the CEO and the treasurer. It’s all on white glossy paper with black ink — scanner ready art. You then just print it onto the cheque.

Technology breeds crime and we are constantly trying to develop technology to stay one step ahead of the person trying to use it negatively.

Can you give me some examples of how technology breeds crime?

If I’m in the airport in London and I take out my iPhone and take a picture of you walking through the airport, I can use PittPatt — an application that used to be used by the FBI but has been bought by Google — for facial recognition. If you are on Facebook [or you are identified by your image online somewhere else, for example a company website] I can find out who you are within seconds. If you happen to tell me where you were born, your date of birth and that kind of information then I’m 98 percent of the way to stealing your identity.

So I tell a lot of the young people that you never want to put a frontal photo of yourself on your Facebook page. Use a photo with a group of friends or doing sport, but never a straight-on funnel photo of yourself.

Another example is a scam involving apps that allow you to scan and deposit cheques using an iPhone. A few weeks ago we had a man out in Kansas City who sold his home and was paid with a cheque for $583,000 (£386,000). He asked for a glass of water and then scanned the cheque with his phone to deposit it into his bank account. When the lady came back, he told her that he’d changed his mind and would prefer for her to wire him the money. He then handed the cheque back and so the buyers then wired him another $583,000. Sometimes I wonder where these people were forty years ago when I needed them!

 

I think people often develop these tools and then they don’t think about the negative side of them. I wish they would spend a bit of time thinking about how their technology could be used for bad purposes and then try and eliminate that possibility.

Would you say that the art of conning people in the pre-digital age, where you have to charm people and look them in the eye, has died?

Yes. In the old days, a conman would be good looking, suave, well dressed, well spoken and presented themselves real well. Those days are gone because it’s not necessary. The people committing these crimes are doing them from hundreds of miles away. The victim never meets them so it doesn’t matter what he or she looks like. It doesn’t involve charm any more, it’s simply a matter of knowing how to use a computer and get into systems and so on.

FrankAbagnale

Do you have any respect for some of the capabilities?

No. They are breaking the law. But I do understand that some of them are extremely creative. A lot of what happens is our fault. For example, I’ve been involved with the FBI for 37 years. Every case involving cybercrime that I’ve been involved in, I’ve never found a master criminal sitting somewhere in Russia or Hong Kong or Beijing. It always ends up that somebody at the company did something they weren’t supposed to do. They read an email, went to a website they weren’t supposed to. So they opened the door that allowed the person to get in. It’s not that these people are that talented but they wait knowing that with a company of 10,000 employees someone is bound to open the door. They just wait for that door to be open.

How do you make companies understand this?

When I go into companies, I throw [USB] sticks on grounds saying ‘confidential’. And then I can see all of the people who pick those sticks up and plug it into their computer. When they do that, they are greeted with a message that says “this is a test and you failed”. Then I explain that I could have easily got into their system. Most of the time when there’s a security breach at a company it’s because someone was doing something they were not supposed to do. You always have a human link that’s the failure. Read the rest of this entry »