The Art of the Steal: How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America's #1 Crime

241 Pages·2002·2.03 MB·English

by  Frank Abagnale

Art
THE
OF THE
Steal
How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from
Fraud—America’s #1 Crime
Frank W. Abagnale
BROADWAY BOOKS
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
What Did She Want?
Chapter One
Putting Down a Positive Con
Chapter Two
Looking for Mr. Goodcheck
Chapter Three
Counterfeit Capers
Chapter Four
The Thief at the Next Desk
Chapter FIVE
The Rock in the Box and the Mustard Squirter
Chapter SIX
Card Games
Chapter SEVEN
Beating the Machine
Chapter EIGHT
The Cyberthief
Chapter NINE
When the Label Lies
Chapter TEN
Empty Promises
Chapter ELEVEN
Stealing Your Soul
Appendix
Fraud Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Frank W. Abagnale
Copyright
To my wife, Kelly,
and my three sons,
Scott, Chris, and Sean
PROLOGUE
[WHAT DID SHE WANT?]
It began on a winter day with a seemingly ordinary message on an answering
machine. It was from someone at the bank. Something about her new Dodge
Ram pickup and the payment past due on the loan. Michelle Brown figured it
was one more of those misdirected calls. Not only didn’t she own a pickup, but
anyone who knew her realized that there was no way she’d ever own a pickup.
She had a penchant for sports cars, and she actually detested Dodges. Because
her name was a common one, it was normal for her to get messages for some
other Brown. In the past, she’d received calls for Mike Brown, a message
looking for a Brown to pick up relatives from Hawaii who were waiting
impatiently at the airport, and a call from some Uncle Brown about her horse she
didn’t have.
Michelle Brown was a single woman in her late twenties. She lived in southern
California and worked as a credit analyst. She was cheerful and luminous, and
people found her fun to be around. Friends were always telling her how she was
too nice. She worked hard and was tidy with her finances. She owned fifteen
credit cards, but had never been late on a single payment. Ever since she was
seventeen, she had had perfect credit. It was a thing with her. She liked
everything in her life to be perfect.
She returned the call. She told the bank officer that there must be a mistake;
she hadn’t bought a truck. The officer quickly agreed that he must have the
wrong Michelle Brown. The phone numbers on the credit application weren’t
working, and he had gotten this number from directory assistance in the hope
that it was the right person. And the application did have her address on it. To
prove beyond a doubt that it was another Michelle Brown he was searching for,
she told him her Social Security number. She was stunned—it was the same one
that was on the application.
Alarmed, she called up the credit reporting agencies and told them that
something fishy was going on. They put a fraud alert on her credit and promised
to send out a report on her recent purchases. She checked with the Division of
Motor Vehicles, and learned something astonishing: a duplicate driver’s license
had recently been issued to a Michelle Brown. Someone else was using her
name, her address, her Social Security number, and her driver’s license. It was as
if someone was slowly erasing her identity.
When her credit report arrived, there were delinquent bills on it for thousands
of dollars, including a sizable phone bill and even a bill for liposuction
treatments. What was this? She’d heard about people who got crosswise with
creditors, but never her. She became afraid to open her own mailbox, for fear of
what new debt would be awaiting her. In time, she would learn that there was an
arrest warrant out for Michelle Brown in Texas. The charge was conspiracy to
sell marijuana. She had never broken a law, any law. How could she be wanted?
Someone had appropriated her identity, but who and how? She felt chained to
some stranger without a face, but with her name. How dare someone steal her
name! She thought chillingly about the movie The Net, in which the actress
Sandra Bullock plays a computer software tester whose identity gets erased by
criminals.
Her whole life was thrust into darkness. She had just started a new job, but
found herself unable to concentrate on her work. She had no appetite for food.
She slept fitfully, if at all. Her bright personality darkened; friends didn’t
recognize her. Her relationship with her boyfriend, a professional volleyball
player, became strained and finally ended. He didn’t understand the depth of her
distress. She spent a lot of time crying.
She began to worry that the other Michelle Brown might break into her
apartment in search of her passport or her checks, or who knew what else.
Whenever she got home after dark, she carried a flashlight and meticulously
searched through the rooms, including every closet. She was weary and angry.
When she went to bed at night, she felt haunted and scared. If she heard the
slightest noise, her first instinct was that the woman calling herself Michelle
Brown was out there lurking in the dark, right beneath her window. She shook
with fear. Who was this person who was stealing her identity? Why, of all the
people in the world, did she pick her? And what did she want?
1
[PUTTING DOWN
A POSITIVE CON]
There’s this thing they always say about con men: they live a chameleon
existence. That was certainly true for me. I’d find myself in an unfamiliar
situation and I’d quickly adapt. And that’s just what I did when they sent me to
prison. I adapted to the role of prisoner, and I lived a life dictated by my
imagination. In so many ways, the role felt small and unreal, when in fact it was
the only real role I had lived in a long time.
Being cooped up in a confined space didn’t suit me, so I sort of half-lived,
numbed to my existence, waiting patiently for a second chance. My battle plan
was to always be on my best behavior, in the hope that this would enable me to
get out early. The problem was, the better I behaved, the more convinced the
prison officials were that I was up to no good. Twice I came up for parole and
was refused. One of the members of the review committee actually said to me, “I
see that your record is perfect, and that’s a problem. That tells me you’re still
conning the prison and getting away with it.” In other words, if I had gotten into
some fist fights or mauled a guard, then I might have gotten parole.
Everything I did right was always assumed to have an ulterior motive. That’s
what happens when you have a reputation, and the reputation is that of a master
con man.
I had been imprisoned for six months in France and another six months in
Sweden, and now I was in my third year of a twelve-year sentence in the Federal
Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia. But I wasn’t one of those
inmates constantly prattling about his innocence. There was no doubt that I
deserved to be behind bars.
LIVING LARGE
For five immature years, I had lived a life of illusion and tricks. I had enjoyed a
misguided and regrettable run as one of the most successful con artists the world
has ever known. A lengthy list of exploits had added to my iconography, all of
them income-producing. I had masqueraded as a Pan Am airline pilot (don’t
worry, I never actually took the controls), a pediatrician (I let my interns do the
medical work), an assistant district attorney (I passed the bar while skipping the
law school part), a sociology professor, and a stockbroker, all between the ages
of sixteen and twenty-one. I had never gone beyond the tenth grade, but I had a
limitless talent for fantasy and I lived a million lives in those five years. Before
the authorities discovered my true identity, I was known throughout the world as
“The Skywayman.” The New York Times, in its coverage, referred to me as “The
Great Impostor.”
What landed me in jail was my other bad habit, which was my enthusiasm for
passing bad checks. The main reason I adopted those guises was to give me
credibility when I cashed hot checks—and to satisfy my great taste for women.
Hotel clerks and merchants didn’t question pilots and doctors too closely.
Through my various hustles, I passed something like $2.5 million worth of
checks, a blizzard of paper that I scattered in earnest throughout all fifty states
and twenty-six countries, all before I was legally allowed to drink. I was
proficient enough at cashing fraudulent checks that I earned the distinction of
becoming one of the most hunted criminals by the FBI.
All bad things come to an end, of course, and I was finally caught by the
French police after a stewardess recognized me from a wanted poster when I was
doing some shopping. I was twenty-one. Convicted of forgery, I spent six
months in a French prison, was extradited to Sweden, where I was again
convicted of forgery, and served another six months in the prison in Malmo.
Then I was turned over to the authorities in the United States.
That transition, however, got mildly delayed. After my plane landed in New
York and was taxiing toward the gate, where the law awaited me, I escaped
through the toilet onto the runway and took off. Within weeks, I got caught at the
Montreal Airport, and was sent to the Federal Detention Center in Atlanta, to
await trial. But I escaped by conning guards into thinking that I was a prison
inspector. That kept me on the lam a bit longer. Actually, all of one month
longer.
By now, a lot of cops had memorized my face, and I could never go anywhere
without looking over my shoulder. The funny thing is that I never resorted to
disguises. I didn’t dye my hair or grow a beard. The reason why I didn’t was
because I was really sensitive to retaining my true identity. Regardless of the
various aliases I adopted, I’d always be Frank Adams or Frank Williams or
Frank something. I wanted to keep at least part of my real name intact. And
because I didn’t take further precautions, I did realize that I was going to get
caught, and probably sooner rather than later. Any criminal recognizes that the
law sleeps, but it never dies.
Finally, one day I was walking past the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
Two plainclothes detectives were standing on the street corner, munching on hot
dogs. One of them stared quizzically at me and yelled, “Hey Frank.” I turned
around, and they identified themselves as police officers and said that I was
Frank Abagnale. I vigorously denied it, but they knew better and took me in.
Within a couple of hours, I had been positively identified. The following day, I
was put in the custody of the FBI.