Barnes and... A Conversation With Frank Abagnale

this program is made possible in part by the Moving Image trust fund [Music] [Applause] hello again everyone and thank you for joining us in at least some circles Frank Abagnale was legend well before those first incredible years of his life were put to film in the wonderful motion picture catch me if you can was depicted those six fantastic years of his late teens and early 20s when a keen intelligence and a theatrical Flair helped him pose as a doctor a lawyer an airline pilot even an FBI agent along the way those impersonations were often central to the multiple financial frauds that put-on told thousands of dollars in his pocket and along the way there were several arrests two escapes two imprisonments on two continents and then a career as a consultant helping financial institutions avoid fraud and assisting law enforcement in detecting and preventing fraud and in recent years Frank Abagnale is concentrated on advising individuals especially senior citizens on how to avoid becoming victims of financial fraud and that is what brings him to Arkansas at the invitation of the Arkansas chapter of the American Association of Retired Persons Frank Abagnale thanks very much for making this time a pleasure to be here thanks for having me your work in recent years as noted has tried to highlight the vulnerability of all of us as consumers to financial fraud and though we can read about firewalls and we can read about counter signing and security checks and alright are we more vulnerable than we were say five years ago absolutely you know I've spent 41 years teaching at the FBI Academy so I have always dealt with crimes against the federal government corporations financial institutions I've written a lot about consumer crimes in some of my books but this was the first opportunity when AARP approached me about three years ago to actually go out and educate people about the scams perpetrated against the elderly and young people as well by telephone by email by the internet and to help educate them as you do in business you educate people how not to fall victim to frauds in the same way with individuals if you show them what their risks are you explain it to them you tell them how the scam works they're smart enough next time they get that call they get their email to do something about it the truth is a majority of people are honest and that's great and because they're honest they don't really think in a deceptive way so you know if the phone rings and it says on the caller ID it's the Internal Revenue Service or the Little Rock Police Department they believe that so they don't know that you can easily manipulate the caller ID so once you teach people that they go along and learn how to protect themselves a lot better so this has been a unique opportunity for me over the last three years to kind of switch gears a little bit and concentrate on crimes against consumers and individuals well recognizing that the ground shifts in financial fraud fairly often what's it the number one what's number one the number one threat as you look at it today well the Internet is the biggest threat you know the Internet as we all know is designed as an academic tool to send papers from one professor to another professor we made it into a security device and now we do all our financial business all our private business while our banking on something that is not secure never has been secure and it's not secured today so consequently that is opened the door to criminals all over the world to defraud companies and individuals and corporations and do it from thousands of miles away so in most cases we find that these boiler rooms are not even located in the United States they're in Malaysia they're in India they're in Hong Kong they're in China so we really don't have the ability to actually go pursue them arrest them take them into custody so the only other answer is to use education to prevent those people from being victimized by those individuals well what's step one and self-protection there I live by a simple rule and the rule is to stop verify so if I get a call tonight and that roof only and it says that it's a Little Rock Police Department I pick it up and it says this is sergeant O'Reilly we arrested your and son they tell you the grandsons name what kind of car he was driving the license plate number of the car who was in the car with him which is a girlfriend that you know and they basically say they've arrested him for drunk driving if he doesn't post bail by the next couple of hours he'll have to spend the weekend in jail he asked us not to call his parents he asked us to call you are you willing to post a bail well yes of course how do I do that where you can just give me a credit card number and we'll post the bail so the red flags are always everything has to be immediate and involves money or personal information the minute those things come into play that's when a time to stop now where they get all their information that to give them the credibility is social media so they've gone to the child's Facebook and they've learned his girlfriend's name what kind of car he drives where he goes to school his name is parents names and they use that as for credibility on the phone that you have to believe this must be real they know everything their thing is accurate and then that's going to come up about give me the money if you actually said that then we're looking I just drive down there and post a bit no you can't do that you have to do it with a credit card the minute they tell you anything is immediate you have to give them money or have to give them information that's when all I ask people to stop there hang up the phone pick up the phone go to the phone book look up the Little Rock Police Department call them and say I just got this phone call from a sergeant O'Reilly who said somewhere we don't have anybody by the name of Sergeant O'Reilly and that's called a grandparent scam so do not fall for that we would have never asked you to send money by credit card that's just a scam that's all all it takes is a couple of minutes to verify whether it's true or not say and you just touched on something there we go to the phone book and live it a lot of people don't have phone books anymore we are utterly dependent on cyberspace on our computers and if we're depending on the the Internet yeah we live in a too much information world there's no question about that but it also can be helpful so there I can go to the computer and look up the little rocket police department and get their phone number if I can't do it through the phone book or through information or ever might be yeah and and the ease with which it can be done I started to say when you were talking about all the information that a scammer would call a grandparent that you know these guys are women I mean they've got a lot of data but fact is as you describe it they can get on any social media platform and maybe in ten minutes get everything except your blood type and I'm not sure about that absolutely if you talk to a real true scam artist or hacker they will tell you that I only need the person's last name and their zip code and I can find out anything about them and that's because we live in a way too much too much information when I'm not on social media but I'm the father of three sons the grandfather of five obviously they like social media so as a grandparent and as a father I've always taught them to use it wisely and how to use it properly unfortunately a lot of young people don't use it correctly and they give away way too much information as do too many too many adults so I saw an email the other day that simply said hi Karen great having lunch with you today I hope you and your husband Robert have a great time at Disney World with the kids when you get back let's get together for lunch again by the way I meant to tell you about this YouTube thought thing I've seen click on this link and watch it I think you'll enjoy it Barbara well she just had lunch with her so she thinks well it must be her but that's how much they go to research to give them that instant credibility so you can't rely on the fact that it's really your friend sending you that email you need to check that email address and see if it actually in fact came from that individual the financial industry of commercial banks with with retail customers such as myself would seem to me to be doing everything they can to get everyone to go electronic they want to handle checks anymore don't want to handle paper though that creates a kind of rub for the consumer that I mean they're in that you've got the institution the bank that doesn't want to handle paper you got a consumer who doesn't particularly want to handle paper can save 48 cents on a stamp and the price of a check with a click of the mouse bang you're absolutely right now I'm a little bit old-school there I'm not of that school of thought we have all the problems for example with the IRS we had 5.7 billion dollars in tax refunds given two individuals that weren't in living in this country who filed for return using electronically somebody else's not Social Security number now this year the IRS has done a little better in 2016 they only paid out three billion dollars of the taxpayers money in fraudulent claims but they stopped thirty two billion dollars in attempts from actually going through when we filed by paper they actually got the physical return they waited for the w2 to come from the employer to match the w2 then they looked at the return they examined it and you waited maybe eight weeks or so to get your money then they decided no we're going to do this electronically and then Congress says not only do you have to do it electronically but you have to make sure that people get their money within four weeks so there I RS is saying look I can't match all of this information I don't even get the w-2 from the employer to match it so I'm taking the word of the person that's sending it in that they did make this much money they did work at this company and I'm paying a return that I've had no time to investigate so it's a little fault of the government as well and but again we we we left paper which was very secure this is why you're starting to actually see checks come back checks are making a return now because people feel a little more comfortable writing a check they can track a check they can stop payment on a check they have to mail the check to a physical address someone has to actually deposit it into a legitimate account so I know that in the state I live in South Carolina two years ago because they had 3.7 million people in South Carolina had their identity stolen by a hack into the tax revenue office now they've actually started making refunds back by check again so they don't do them electronically so I think we're starting to see a slow turn back to that because of that because it's so easy to do anything that you do mobile Wireless or electronically than anyone can easily intercept that well I've been the tarp personally I've been the target of ridicule from friends because I don't do it I write checks under electronic banking my troglodyte now I write checks I don't do online banking I don't trust online banking I certainly wouldn't do mobile banking on a mobile phone so I'm a little old-fashioned just like that I write checks now I will tell you this I'm careful about who I write checks to so I write a check to pay my mortgage I write a check to pay my car note I write a check to pay the insurance company but the problem also is if I were to go in to CBS tomorrow or grup store and write a check for say nine dollars I have to hand the clerk the check and on the check is my name and address and phone number my bank's name and address my account number at that Bank my routing number into that account that's your wiring instructions my signature on the signature card at that bank and then the clerk has written down my state driver's license and my date of birth well I don't get that check back we live in truncation so I get an image of the check the physical check goes to their warehouse and then sixty-five days they destroy it but anyone who would see the face of that check could actually draft on my bank account they could wire money out of my account or they literally could turn around and basically go in through checks in the mail com look for checks that look like my check in the same design order those checks with their name on it but my account number alright so every check there write debits against my account so I'm a little careful about who I write checks to but I still write check you're scaring the daylights out of me and everybody who's watching this program how what's our level of risk over is there in this culture in this commercial culture in this cyber climate of ours well there's a great deal of risk yeah you know we're making a big thing about Equifax and it certainly is but I remind people that in 2016 we had one thousand two hundred and six breaches that took one point seven billion identities during that 12 months we had to add two more recently three weeks ago because the SCC the security Exchange Commission admitted they had a breach in 2016 so we added them and then a week later Deloitte said they had a breach they didn't tell us about so we added them we're now into November of 2017 we've already had 1103 breaches and we haven't finished the year out the big thing about Equifax is the fact that they stoled your name they stole your social security number in the stole your date of birth you can't change your name you can't change your social security number you can't change your date of birth so they will typically hold that type of data or what refer to warehouse it for the next two or three years before they ever bring it out into the marketplace it's not going to come out in the next year or two they typically hold that type of data for two to three years before they release it when you breach a Home Depot or a Target and steal credit card numbers and debit card numbers you have to get rid of that right away it has an extremely short shelf life but if I steal your personal information I can hold on to that information so we had that breach in South Carolina three years ago we are just now starting to see some of those identities being used on the dark web and being sold sometimes criminals will take that information a little earlier and use it for government benefits because governments do not use credit bureaus or credit reports so if I apply to the IRS for a tax refund or I apply to Medicare or Medicaid and they don't use credit bureaus so they can use that to get benefits in my name but most of the time they were warehouse that information for two or three years so offering me one year of credit monitoring service is just the wait nothing is going to happen in a year even the dumbest criminal realizes you just gave everybody a free year of credit monitoring so they're not gonna do anything with your information for a year and let's keep in mind that whatever number they initially give you a hundred and forty five million identity stolen that's the initial number I'm sure that's going to turn out to be about two hundred and fifty identities that were stolen during that Equifax they originally said 1.3 million drivers license so far they're up to ten point six million driver's licenses so it's gonna be a lot higher than they initially told us what and at the core of so much of this anyway you you write is the relative ease with which a hostile party or anybody can obtain your mine so their social security number absolutely and then we're loose with it are we not we're not only loose with it but then I've learned one thing I've been dealing with breaches back to t.j.maxx some 15 years ago and one thing I've learned for sure is that every breach every breach occurs because somebody in that company did something they weren't supposed to do or somebody in that company failed to do something they were supposed to do hackers do not cause breaches people do so what happens in the case of South Carolina an employee took home a laptop they weren't supposed to take home they were in an unsecure environment the hacker got in in the case of Equifax they didn't update their infrastructure security they didn't fix the patches they were supposed to fix so they opened the door for the criminal to get in you know a bank like Chase Bank in New York spends about a half a billion dollars a year on technology every year to keep people in criminals out of the bank however they employ two hundred thousand people so they're just waiting for one person to make a mistake and open that door and once they get in they're able to do that we have the technology to keep them out but technology is only good if you use it and the people that are in control of it are handling like properly did we only had only a couple of days ago in in the New York Times it was reported that the National Security Agency the NSA had been hacked profoundly hacked and some of its tools stolen and which are now being used by foreign even hostile governments against us where's the sin again so four years ago the Office of Personnel Management had a breach they didn't make it public so a team of people went in and said look you have a lot of loopholes here you need to fix these things and here's a list of things you need to repair a year later almost to the day they had another breach so that same team went back and said you know we're here a year ago to do fix these things or any of these things on the list No and they've warned them that you're gonna have a major breach well then they had that breach at 21 million federal government employees at former government employees government contractors have had their identity stolen by the Chinese government including more than ten million fingerprints of those government employees it didn't have to happen if people had done the right thing so that was a case where they failed to do what they were supposed to do so you know the last during the month of October is Cyber Awareness Month this week is fraud international fraud Awareness Week so I spend most of my time at companies yesterday was at a in New York at their corporate headquarters streamed out to all of their employees around the world to talk to them about the importance of their job and the most important part of their job is to keep the information that's been entrusted with them safe that's their number-one job whether they're the janitor or the CEO seniors it would appear or is it fair to say especially vulnerable well in many cases now at AARP they did a survey a couple years ago jointly with Microsoft 6,000 people and they found that Millennials were more apt to fall for the scam of I need to fix your computer there's something wrong with there you have to let me in they they kind of fell for it I think they do pick these boiler rooms around the world tend to pick on elderly folks and they they tend to again use all these different scams at all all these scams you see today that I wrote about 20 years ago 30 years ago are the same scams today there's just a different method of delivering it were 30 years ago you had to be a conman you had to be the well dressed well sophisticated well-spoken guy you had to sit down with the individual and scam them out of their their money today there's no such person like that because these people were sitting in a kitchen with a cup of coffee on their laptop in Moscow scamming you they don't see the victim the victim doesn't see them there's no emotion involved they strictly trying to rip you off so these boiler rooms are just talking to somebody on the phone or emailing some man on the phone so that whole thing has changed a lot it makes it easier for the criminal to commit it it's a lot safer for the criminal and unfortunately for the victim they're falling for these things over a device by whether it be a phone or whether it be a robo call or whatever it might be and decades ago when you were a he was four it making your bones so weak that you you but you told the Wall Street Journal not long ago it is 4,000 times easier to pull off a scam today than it was absolutely because I didn't have the technology they have today so a simple example of that is like for me to print checks I actually needed a printing press I had to spend eight months learning how to operate the press but there were color supper there were negatives there were plates there were typesetting today you just sit down at a computer you bring up a check on your diagram up on the screen and then you pick a company in Arkansas and you grab their corporate logo you put it on the check and you put their corporate address in you put a nice background in there then you basically all you have to do is make a couple of calls because we live in a too much information world so if I call the company and I asked for someone in accounts receivables I simply say to them hey I'm getting ready to pay this invoice you sent us we prefer to wire the money they immediately tell you we bank at this Bank or what street city routing number or account number everything you need to put on the cheque if you hang up and call back and ask for their corporate communications and you say hey could you send me a copy of your annual report sure we'll mail it out to you tomorrow on page three is the signature of the chairman of the board the CEO the CFO the treasurer of the controller you scan it white paper black ink and it put it on the cheque the technology has made it a lot easier and the way that you can reach now people millions of people all over the world with just an email or a phone call has made it much much easier than when I did it yeah well as you put it a felonious geek in Beijing absolutely no well and real estate scams now in terms of wire transfers you've got not equity minute but right so just grow money right escrow my so last week in Chicago I was speaking before the National Realtors Association and they were up in arms about this scam is being perpetrated everywhere it's just taken off like wildfire and that's simply where you're you maybe just sold your house you made $200,000 on it you're a young couple so you're going to buy a new house and you're gonna put that two hundred thousand dollars down so you did all the paperwork and whether using a law firm or whether it's the bank all of a sudden you get an email says hey we need your escrow money route your escrow money to this here's the routing information and they immediately go send the money and it's not from the bank and it's not from the attorney and then that couples out two hundred thousand dollars their down payments gone and who has the liability is that the liability of the bank is that the liability the individual because they did something that shouldn't have done then that comes in question but that is now becoming a very popular scam so I told the realtor's as I would tell bankers and any attorneys or law firms that you have to educate your customer so it's your position and your place to say to the customer now look as we go through this closing there will be a time when you have to pay escrow do not pay escrow to any email that does not get a phone call directly from me or I directly send you the email and you call me to verify before you send the money because there is a scam going on this is how the scam works now once people know that they're gonna say well I got this email but I heard there's a scam going around so I'm going to make sure I verify this is the right thing to do with the money but if you never heard of that scam you would naturally say oh well they want me to wire the money to this account so it would fall to the legal community the real estate community the financial community to be proactive with their clientele more than and I believe that's very important education is the most powerful tool to fighting crime I've always said that during my whole career and what's great about what I like about working with AARP and I've been to ten states every year for the last three years with them thousands of people come to these presentations but what I like is that there is no fee you don't have to be an AARP member and they don't allow anything to be sold at it it is strictly an educational program for people to come and learn about these scams and how they work and then what to do being proactive to make sure that they don't get taken and that goes a long way to keeping people safe yeah and for the very youngest those who are starting out with their iPhones which they can't seem to get out of their hand or won't put down whatever they're putting more data in there than they know absolutely there's three things to remember on social media you never want a straight photograph of yourself on face from you that by that I mean a driver's license photo passport photo those are easily taken and then used for identity to say that they are you so you don't want a straight photograph of yourself and facial recognition tools like pit-pat and find a face are simple tools that are available online that can bring me to your facebook page just by taking your pick it'll search those Facebook pages and bring me to your Facebook page and if you happen to tell me on your Facebook page where you were born and your date of birth then that's 98% of me stealing your identity so I always tell young people you're gonna have a photo you have a photo of you and your dog have a photo and you and your friends you're playing a sport figure playing baseball and never ever tell anyone on Facebook where you were born and your date of birth otherwise your mouse will say come steal my identity yeah we've created something haven't we accountable monster roots yeah I think Facebook and I've said this many times it's going to turn out to be kind of like bitcoins it's going to be a bad thing and in the end there's gonna be a big bust I mean when you have two billion people you have changed the psychology of the way people think and they are so tied in now to Facebook that I think in the end Facebook is not going to be a good thing it's gonna end up being a bad thing Frank Abagnale thanks very much Joe being with us thank you for your time my pleasure as always thanks to you for watching we'll see you next time [Music] this program is made possible in part by the Moving Image trust fund you [Music]

Channel: Arkansas PBS

Views: 45,957

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Id: I1IWUAcl0GA

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017