Frank Abagnale Interview

[Music] Frank first I'd like to have you talk a little bit about your partnership with AARP you're partnering with them on their fraud watch Network how did that come about you know it's very interesting because I've spent the last four decades talking to banks corporations financial institutions dealing with crimes against the federal government and its agencies and really not a lot with consumers all the books I've written have been business-to-business books about business crime and about three years ago AARP contacted me and said we went out and surveyed forty million of our members to ask them what was concerning them the most and the number one thing was fraud so then we started to say well what can we do about that so we went to look for resources within the government outside the government and we couldn't find any resources that in information and material to help educate people so we decided to start the fraud watch Network and we would like to have you come on board help us make the content help us design the video and then we like to take you out each year to go to about ten states every year and actually address people one on one about all these issues so it's been a great experience the last three years and what I like most about it is there there are no fees involved anybody can come you don't have to be an ARP member they don't allow anything to be sold so it's strictly a belief that I've had that they have for many years and that is that education is the most powerful tool to fighting crime so if you can show people these scams explain how they work when that phone rings next time they'll know how to deal with that and so what's different about talking directly to consumers versus talking to government officials government agencies or to corporations corporations and banks they're worried about the there are internal operations are worried about cybercrime and hacks into their systems and forgeries and frauds committed against them in mortgage loans and things like that where the consumer is really interested in really what about me what do I do to protect myself if I use social media how do I use it safely if I I get a phone call like this grandparent scam or a sweepstakes scam what do I do and how do I know it's a scam and what action should I take so it's really addressing the individual on how to protect themselves and it's interesting that people now are very very concerned about how to protect themselves or identity and that their family and their children so it's an issue that everybody's interested in how does the fraud watch Network work it's very simple you don't have to be a member of AARP but there is an 800 number so let's say that you got a phone call tonight and you thought some scam was being perpetrated you can call the 800 number and you'll speak to a live person you can explain to them what happened and they'll tell you yes ma'am that's a fraud do not send them any money do not do anything and if you've been a victim and you lost the money already they will then take you through the right steps to alert the police try to recover or help you recover that money and walk you through it and again you could be 20 years old or you could be 80 years old you could be a member not a member and of course you can go to their website at the fraud watch Network and you can go to that site and see all kinds of videos that actually play out these scams so you can watch them so you'll recognize them when they come next time and also the things you should do to protect yourself well that's a that's a tremendous service and one of the things that you do when you go out and you talk about you give people tips to these consumer events is you always start with telling your story and why is that I think AARP likes for people to know who I am and my background even though there may be a little familiar with about the movie so I always start off the first 30 minutes with that most of the time when I speak at banks and conventions I don't I just get into the topic of whatever the technology is but here it's a little different and I think it's great because I'm the guy they look at me as that's the guy who did it that's the guy who knows and they tend to listen to me a lot more so one of the reporters in an interview today said to me I I'm always trying to tell my mom about these things but I want to approach it very carefully because I don't want to meet that make her sound like she's stupid or someone's going to swim you and I don't know how to really say it so I tell her to listen to you and she listens to you if I tell her to do these things she ignores me about if she hears you say do those things she does it so that's great do you ever get tired of telling that story I get tired of telling the story about my life I don't get tired to talk about fraud because fraud changes everyday there's always new scams as always new types of frauds going on it's something that always keeps your interest about how they did it and how do you prevent it I do get a little tired talking about my life and reliving through all that but I understand the importance of people hearing it so what I try to do is I know that people are fascinated by what I did some 50 years ago as a teenage boy so I use that in the opening of that 30 minutes to capture their attention get them online but I try to bring them full circle as my life has come to take them on that journey that I went on to end the conversation with where I am today and how I got there and why I got there and so on when I told my son I was going to have the chance to interview you he said ask him how did he do it how did he come up with all those schemes and the answer to that is that I was so young you know I always believed that I wasn't brilliant or a genius as most people tried to say I was just a young 16 year old boy who ran away from home ended up on the streets in New York back in the 60s a lot of kids ran away from home unfortunately but a lot of them got caught up in haight-ashbury the hippie scene the drug scene I thought to myself how am I going to survive I'm in New York I'm sixteen years old I have nothing so the first thing I realized is no one's gonna deal with me as soon as they realize I'm 16 so I'm gonna have to advance my age by at least 10 years so I was able to alter my driver's license by one digit and my date of birth back then they didn't have a photo on it was just an IBM card and I raised my age by 10 years so I was 26 and then I started you know realizing I started writing checks as a way to support myself and survive but I think I got away with all the things I got oh yes I was very creative I was very observant I saw things other people didn't see maybe but most of it was that being an adolescent I had no fear of being caught I had no fear of consequences there was no fear of it's impossible nothing's impossible it can be done so you know I tell people that when I sat in front of a bank with a check in my hand for $500 and I was going to go in and cash it there was no plan I didn't sit there and say okay if they say this then I'll do this if they say this do that I just went in and did it and that was the adolescent in me I always believed that hi I've gotten a little older and did this at 25 or 26 I would have rationalized and said you can't get away with doing this you can't pose as this person get away with I would have never done those things that was so idle I think being an adolescent had a lot to do with the success of what I did how much different is it today for that adolescent to purr you know to try to commit those kinds of fraudulent crimes versus what it was like back then what's really changed well technology so it's 4,000 times easier today to do what I did 50 years ago as a teenager and I would say that the only thing that might be a little difficult would be posing as a pilot and that's because when I did it there were no airport security there were no terrorists there were no hijackings but even then you know you can make up such Incredibles sophisticated identification today because of the computer software programs and so even replicating that identification you know you watch them walk through the airport they just kind of hold it up like this and walk by nobody's really looking at it so I don't think it would be that difficult even to get into access to the airport anymore unfortunately but you know things like when I printed checks later on I had to learn how to operate a printing press there were color separations there were negatives there were plates there were typesetting today you just sit down at a computer in you design a check in a few minutes and of course if you want a company's corporate logo you go to their website and you're captured if you want the bank's logo you go there website you capture it so in 15 minutes you've made a beautiful beautiful check and the fact that we live in a too much information world there's nothing you can't find out where before I had to research everything now you can just call and find anything out you talked about the fact that one of your first books I think as maybe in the late 80s that you wrote it that back then you were writing about things that you knew we're gonna scams and cons that we're gonna be happening in 2000 and beyond how were you able to predict that number one and then number two what are we facing in the next 20 years well I like to look at crime because when I teach at the FBI Academy so I like to teach agents what will you be investigating five years from now 10 from now so in the 80s I wrote about identity theft not that I invented the crime it was a crime but it didn't required a lot of research and there wasn't done very often so if I read that you were homebuilder of the year but in that article I read that you filed bankruptcy ten years earlier then you got out of bankruptcy and built the largest home building company in the Midwest I would have strolled down to the federal bankruptcy court dug out a copy of your bankruptcy filing and that would have had your social security number your date of birth your wife social security number her date of birth their signature and I would have stoled your identity the difference today as I could do that from Moscow sitting in a kitchen on a laptop with a cup of coffee in my hand so technology has made it a lot a lot easier to do today and to and to get away from it from thousands of miles away so when I look today I know that we have the ability for example right now to shut off someone's pacemaker but we have to be within 35 feet of them so we can kill them on the spot or we can speed it up shut it down or any bodily device operated by a computer or a chip I know that we can stop a vehicle going down the interstate that we're chasing as long as we get within 35 feet of the vehicle we can take over the vehicles computers and we can shut the motor off we can turn the airbag on we can lock the passenger in the car we can shut the windows so they can't open them so my question is if we can do that now but we're restricted by footage what will it be five years from now can I do that from 500 miles away 5,000 miles away or even just a hundred miles away so I think that's where cyber right now has been a crime up to stealing money stealing data financial crime but I think it's going to turn much blacker I think people are going to see it as a tool to shut down the electrical grid shut down a banking system kill someone but to be able to do it from very far away well and you've written that about the minute you uncover one scheme you need to be ready for the next one that's already occurring how how can we do that how can we these fraudsters are so quick and so fast and so creative how can we really be prepared for the next one that's coming down it's because we approach everything in the wrong way so if I develop a device that I tell you you can put in your kitchen and you can talk to it you can have what's the weather today what's on TV today I want to order something from Amazon did anyone ask the question can I reverse that device so that I can listen to everything you say in your kitchen or in your house and the answer is yes because the manufacturers of a lot of these technologies that come to the marketplace a refrigerator that tells you whether is milk in it those are also tools that criminals use in just in a reverse way so I'm always saying why would you not develop this technology but then stop and say how would someone misuse this technology and let's close that loophole unfortunately market ears are very quick to get the product to the market let's get it sold let's get the money in and they don't ask that question so they give us a lot of devices that really yours your television at home your remote control even the security cameras that are around your house looking at your property can be tools used by someone on the outside to gain information about you on the inside but that doesn't have to happen so it's the same way when we have the incident like with Equifax that didn't have to happen if the company had updated their system had fixed the patches just like when you get Microsoft tells you put this patch on to block this random we're getting on your computer you do it and they didn't do it so they caused this breach so I think we could stop a lot of the things if we just take the time and energy to to do it well and and you've been critical of some organizations like Equifax for not making the investments in the latest technology which organizations are doing that who's doing it right well there are a lot of companies for example I've had the opportunity to work on two great technologies during my career one was called the forty-first parameter it was a fraud detection technology which is owned by Experian which is the world's largest credit bureau that's now used in 80 countries around the world now I'm working on a technology called Tru Sona for troop asana so that we can do away with passwords so that in two years from now there will be no more passwords and the CEO that of that company out in Scottsdale Arizona was once being interviewed and the interviewer said you know I know that for the last 15 years you've used Frank Abagnale as your adviser on these technologies but the truth is Frank Abagnale doesn't write code he said you're absolutely right he doesn't but I'm not a criminal I can never think like Frank Abagnale I can be the smartest person in the world and he is in creating software and technology but I don't think like he thinks so he said I would best say to you that our relationship is that we play chess I develop something I bring it to him and say here this is how it works and he goes well I would circumvent that by doing this so then I go back and I fix that and I come back and I built this wall yeah but I can get through that wall by doing myth and I fixed that until the day he tells me I really can't see any way to circumvent this you have a good system here then I bring it to the marketplace and I think that's the that's how you really need to look at things to find out how to whether they're going to really be an asset to someone let's talk about more individual security fraud and and those kinds of schemes what are the signs you should look for that would indicate that somebody's trying to steal your identity or messing with your credit cards well first of all all of these so-called robo calls and all of these emails and things like that are all based on two things it's an urgency you have to do it immediately right now and they want something right now money credit card number so you know we have what's called the grandparent scam which is a very very common scam right now and someone goes and the phone rings and you walk over and it says it's the police department so you pick it up and you assume it is the police department the caller ID is very easily manipulated with simple software so then someone says I'm Sergeant Ryan we arrested your grandson they give you the grandsons name what kind of car he was driving they tell you the girl that was with him it's girlfriend's name and they know all this information they say we have him in custody he asked us he gets one call he asked us not to call his parents but to call you and he needs to post bail in the next two hours or I've spend a weekend in jail oh my god well how do I do that well you just need to give me a credit card number and we can post the bail on that and millions of people fall for this every year and again the urgency is right now if you said to them on the phone well look I'll just come down the police department and post no no I need you to do it right now and you can use a credit card so it's always immediate and that should be a red flag so I live by two simple words stop verify that way you never get scammed because in that case I would have hung the phone up picked up the phone book looked up the police department called and said I just got this call from her sorry we don't have a sergeant Ryan and that's scam do not respond to that call that's all as whether it's the IRS whether it's Social Security man whatever it is if I'm your bank credit card company then you turn your card over you take it out of your wallet there's an 800 number customer service you call them said just got this call they told me they needed this information no sir that's that's not us that's the scam so if people would just stop for a minute and take three minutes to just simply verify there's nothing wrong with being skeptical and you know it's kind of a virtue to be skeptical and so I just tell people if you would do that you'd find that you wouldn't get stuck with all these scams so that's a you know some indications of when someone's trying to scam you but if you're just you know going on in your life and everything seems fine you haven't had a call like that but someone's trying to access your finances your identity in some other way how would you know about that there's a few things that I do to protect my Danny and have done for years one this is why I've used a credit monitoring service since 1992 so for about 25 years and I think they charge me like twelve dollars a month what I like most about it is I can monitor my own credit I really don't need them because they allow me if I want to go online 15 times a day and look at my credit so in a matter of minutes I pull up all three credit bureaus Equifax Experian TransUnion the first thing I see is my score for the day what my credit score is then I can scroll down through my own credit and say I have this loan I paid off this loan and at the very bottom I see all inquiries made against my credit what we call soft hits and hard hits a soft tip would be for example your credit card company because you applied for a new credit card they're checking your credit a hard hit would be the IRS your bank your insurance company your employer checking your credit I see all of that so I can literally monitor my own crash if I like but they're also monitoring it for me and they'll notify me in real time if someone's attempting to use my credit so I always use a credit monitoring service I don't write a lot of checks in today's environment if I go into a drugstore and write a $9 check I actually have to hand the clerk the check 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 you're wiring instructions my signature on the signature card that's at the bank and then they've written down my state driver's license number and my date of birth I don't get the check back we live in truncation which means I get an image of the cheque the cheque sits in a warehouse till it's destroyed but anyone who would see that cheque could draft on my bank account they could order cheques and then write checks off my account that's care so yes I don't I don't I'm very careful who I write a check to but the best way to remove a lot of your personal liability is the safest form of payment that exists on the face of the earth and that is a credit card Visa MasterCard American Express Discover card I don't have a debit card I never owned a debit card I've had three sons I've never allowed them to have a debit card I don't have a debit credit I only have a credit card every day in my life I literally spend the credit card company's money I never spend my money it's it's in a money market account it earns interest nobody knows where it is so it's exposed to no one I go to the cleaner I give my credit card I go pick up groceries I give my credit card I put fuel in my boat I use my credit card I paid for the slip my boat sits in all year they bill it through my credit card I have to travel overseas a lot oh I need money out of the ATM in London or wherever I am i stick my credit card and I get pounds I get euros I use the credit card now I will do everything to keep the numbers safe but if someone were to charge $1,000,000 on my credit card tomorrow by federal law my liability is zero I have no liability if I buy something online they don't deliver it turns out to be that it's broken or it turns out that it was a false cite to begin with I'm not liable my credit card company takes care of it when I pay the bill every month or part of the bill that's due my credit score goes up so I continue to build my credit and my credit score when you use a debit card every time you reach for you're exposing only one per since money your money if they steal that money it's your money they're stealing so when we did all these breaches over the last 15 years going way back to t.j.maxx specially retail breaches like Home Depot target and you do a post investigation and you speak to someone that said well no I used a credit card at the store and so they canceled my card and two days later FedEx sent me a new Visa Card that's the last I heard about it oh no not me I had a debit card they took three thousand dollars out of my checking account I had to wait three months while they were investigating to get my money back I had to pay my house note I had to pay tuition so I've always found that the safest form of payment is to simply use a credit card and you do away with a lot of concern about someone stealing your money or getting into your personal accounts well those are some good tips and you have a lot of tips I know so much your website and you talk about them during the presentations that you make if someone follows all of them how safe how protected are they they're very very protected but not a hundred percent like I had a question today that someone said to me I want to use this credit monitoring service and the king was LifeLock and they said how do I know that all this information I give them is going to be safe and someone doesn't hack into LifeLock well you don't know because every any company can be hacked into so what you have to hope is that LifeLock has good internal structures they're keeping up with all of their software updates and they're maybe they have good IT department and that's the best you can hope for there is a risk no matter what you do if you bank online there's a risk if you write a check there's a risk and that's why what comes all back to the only form of payment that has no risk based on the statues is a credit card so that's the only form of payment where there is no risk everything else is a risk someone would Forge your check steal the check alter the check that's a risk that someone hacks into my online banking account gets my money so there's always going to be a little risk but you have to use some common sense if you feel that you were the legitimate company they've been around a long time they have a lot of safety measures in place then you're probably pretty safe to deal with that company if you find out that someone has hacked into your account has stolen your identity what should you do well first of all you always need to notify your bank and notified police so one you have a police report so if the issue comes up that you did file a police report and second you want to notify your bank the way the law is structured you have 30 days from receipt of your statement to notify the bank of any discrepancy so whether you're online banking or you have a checking account if you're not reconciling and you're not paying attention and four months later you find out that $15,000 was taken out of your account four months ago the bank is not going to reimburse you because you've passed the deadline for their liability so I tell people it's very important you reconcile even if you open your bank statement and you take out the images of the cheques and you look at them and go yeah I wrote all this you just look at it even that's better than not doing anything and of course if you're online you should always be checking your balance checking your account if you're doing that then the law protects you from liability and rules the liability to the bank but it's amazing how many people don't reconcile and then they have an issue and it's happened six months ago and of course the bank is not liable to give you that money back it's unnerving to think about the kind of grandparent scam that you talked about my mother was almost a victim of one of those where someone called her up and said your granddaughter the name my daughter is in South America is in trouble and needs money right away fortunately my mom called me first but she was in a panic I mean she was really scared it's it's frightening and frustrating it makes me mad that our elderly citizens get picked on so easily but you've said that we also have to worry about our kids explained it well first of all I'm very concerned about children's identities because we have seen a huge increase in stealing children's identities and the reason for that is is on the dark web if you look if you selling an identity of a 62 year old man who is a multi-millionaire he owns shopping malls office buildings hotels you have all his data that seems real impressive but if you put next to that person a fourteen-year-old boy who's in junior high school who has no assets they'll take the 14 year old boy because the 14 year old boy has no credit and for the next several years I can become that 14 year old boy and I can sell that identity over and over and I can use her for a long period of time this is why I'm the dark web a child coming out of a hospital a newborn is much more valuable than a child who's 14 because now I can be that newborn for 18 19 years before anyone will ever know I stole their identity so we are very concerned about children's identities and and we should be are you actually seeing that happen are we seeing that happen all the time as a matter of fact couple years ago Carnegie Mellon did a great study where they went across 50 states to interview 40,000 children they randomly picked these children from all walks of life and either interviewed the child or the parent or the Guardian to find out at the end of all of that that more than 10% of those children had already had their identities stolen so we know it's a major issue so now you're starting to see some of the credit monitoring companies I know for example LifeLock has what's called junior life lock and you're able to I think it's 595 a month you're able to go in there and they will monitor your child's social security number and let you know if anyone's attempting to use your child's social security number so we're starting to see more of that because they're recognizing that as being an issue a couple of friends of mine told me that they went to file their taxes last year and the IRS said oh you've already filed them and you got a refund which was news to them and they found out that they that during a hack of the IRS in 2015 that someone had gotten their information and then filed their taxes and took that refund well I didn't even know there was an IRS hack in 2015 so what do we do today to find out if we've been affected by something like that and it'll prepare ourselves and the IRS has been is been a problem the last year were they five point eight billion dollars of the taxpayers money went out to criminals many of them don't live in this country filing tax returns using somebody else's social security number this year the IRS has done much better they've take they've had about thirty billion dollars in attempts but they've gotten it down to about three billion they paid out so they're figuring out they're figuring out how to to recognize people and there's more better technology but again the that should have never happened to begin with because in the case of the IRS there was technology available through things like that analytics and things like that that you can spot those things being attempted but they didn't have it in place so it's all about not being a proactive but reactive so then once there's a big problem they go well we got to do something about this I believe you need to be proactive and look ahead and say how would someone get into the IRS and do this and then put those things in place to keep that from happening it's almost a cost of doing business these days if you're going to have people's data you have to have the technology to protect it yeah and you need to take the responsibility so if I'm a bank or I'm Equifax or whoever it may be if you have my personal data and I've entrusted it with you and for negligence on your part something you did cause someone to get that and caused me harm I should have the right to sue you and recover from that now if something happened that you had no power over that's one thing Act to God or something to happen that you couldn't control that's one thing but that's why I think there needs to be laws in place that hold those companies liable if they're going to take that information and store it they're gonna need to be responsible for keeping it safe and doing the things they need to keep it safe in your book you mentioned that law enforcement doesn't always prosecute smaller thefts or fraudulent cases it has to be a hundred thousand or more or something like that so that's kind of scary in a way and frustrating so if something like that happens to me and it's not a huge amount there's no recourse you know and the problem here is that last year we had 958 billion dollars in white-collar related fraud crimes it's just white-collar within the United States fraud almost a trillion a trillion dollars the defense of our country is about 740 billion so more than the entire defense of our country goes out to fraud and scams and all times a white-collar crime so law enforcement is very limited so what happens is they set benchmarks and say we're not going to investigate anything under this dollar amount and then when they get to that level you have the US attorney or the state attorney who may have a benchmark of their own that say I'm not investigating or taking to trial or prosecution anything less than this amount so it's like when people say to me you know I had a my credit card was fraud we used I know who did it I went to report it to the credit card company they told me not to worry about it that it wasn't my liability they didn't even want to know the name of the person who fraudulently used the card well that's because the credit card company is dealing with gangs stealing five and seven million dollars from them they're not worried about this guy who took three thousand dollars out of an ATM machine so you have to unfortunately say what is the biggest things I need to be concerned about and go have to do to limited access resource and etc that makes sense so it's all the more important that we do everything we can to protect ourself obviously I remind people all the time that you cannot rely on the police you cannot rely on the government you cannot rely on the bank to protect you you have to be a little smarter you have to be a little wiser consumer today than you did 25 years ago what is the government doing to address this unfortunately not much I mean the government again when AARP went out to find out who has programs to educate people about this work and someone watch a video about these scams or even pick up a book about them there were no resources for that you know what's interesting is I to Des Moines Iowa a number of years ago really to work with the police department in 1980 to film some public service ads that were put on TV all over the nation about protecting your credit card protecting your bank account was all filmed with the Des Moines police department we used a new york film crew the DOJ the Department of Justice sponsored the public service ads and even years later when I had little children they were still running the ads on TV and my kid with the dad's on TV you know and there was years ago in the 80s in the late 80s I did a lot of bank statement stuffers that banks would put a tip in there from me about protecting your checkbook protecting your assets now you don't see that anymore there's very little public service ads there if you have a bank statement stuffer they're selling you something so they're not bringing value to the customer so when I do go for example in tour for these banks those banks are bringing value to their customers because they're basically telling their customers here's your risks and here's how you can protect yourself from them and I'm done fortunately there's very few banks and companies that that do and you'd think with the in the amount of breaches that we hear about almost on a daily basis that that would inspire more organizations to do more yeah and I know that people are very concerned about Equifax but I remind of that in 2016 there were 1206 breaches amounting and 1.7 billion identities being stolen and then we learned just last week that we had to add two numbers to that because there was a breach in 16 of the SCC and there was a breach of Deloitte the accounting firm so those were not known they're just now becoming known on tour unfortunately these breaches happen and they try to hide them as long as they can hide them whatever number they tell you it is that number is going to continue to increase because it's never going to be the true number it's always a lot more than the existing number so breaches occur every day and that's why companies have got to get better at keeping this information safe if I thought it was impossible I'd understand that but it's not impossible it's a matter of educating their employees about the most important job they have is keeping that information safe and keeping up with the proper technologies and things that we have now to keep us safe if you don't do that technology's worthless if you don't use it so the top three things that people should do to protect their identities I do what I do I shred everything so yesterday you got a catalog you looked at it you threw it away but on the back cover was your name and address a barcode a source code an ID number that's more than enough information for me to become you second I don't go on Facebook and tell people where I was born and my date of birth otherwise your mouse will say come steal my identity those are two things you don't want to state on a Facebook or a social media site I don't write a lot of checks except to pay the mortgage or pay an insurance company because I'm careful about giving away a piece of paper that has so much information and personal information on it and I do use a credit monitoring service and a credit card so that I don't have the financial liability if something does happen and I have the credit monitoring service so I can personally check my own credit and monitor it myself as well as them doing it and people can find out more of your tips at your website and then also at AARP because that Abagnale com I don't sell anything I have nothing the salad is strictly an educational site so you can go there under publications and a lot of different topics cybercrime identity theft if you're a retail or how to spot a short change artists or counterfeit bill and of course a our piece fraud watch Network has great information on consumer related scams and crimes and how not to fall victim to them thank you for your service Frank thanks for the interview thank you [Music] you

Channel: Iowa PBS

Views: 51,392

Rating: 4.7857141 out of 5

Keywords: Iowa Public Television, Frank Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can, identity theft, cyber crime, Stealing Your Life

Id: vULkpDWa0D0

Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2017