Frank Abagnale on how to protect against ID theft, fraud

I've been involved in the investigation of hundreds of literal breaches from everything from Veterans Administration to hotels.com to LexisNexis to choice point in every breach I've ever been involved in it's always because someone internally has done something they weren't supposed to do they read an email they should've read they went onto a site they should have gone on there is no master criminal sitting in Hong Kong or somewhere around the world and he's hacking into these systems anytime you integrate a great hacker they will tell you that I don't have the ability to get through that technology however there's out 10,000 employees there so eventually someone's going to do something they're not supposed to do and that's going to open the door for me to get in and that's exactly what happened so a perfect example is I live in South Carolina last year someone hacked into the tax revenue office installed three and a half million tax records of the citizens of South Carolina that was their entire return so not only did they get all their Social Security numbers but the social security numbers of their children if they paid their taxes by cheque they got an image of their checks so they knew where their bank their account number how the cheque was signed if they used a credit card they got the credit card number at first the state said we didn't do anything wrong someone hacked into the system when I was interviewed about it I said that's impossible someone had to have done something at the tax revenue offices should have done and sure enough after a month of an investigation it turned out that's exactly what happened so I find it interesting when I go out to a company to speak one of the things I do is I pull up in the rental car of the parking lot and I throw a bunch of sticks onto the ground that's a confidential and then I go in to speak and at about lunch time I open my laptop and I see all these people who looked at those sticks which actually say this is a test and you failed but I go to explain to them what I could have done had by them opening up that sticks that's amazing but it's very important to train and educate people the importance of not doing those things but what's amazing to someone like me it's it's become 4,000 times easier to do today than when I did it 50 years ago because of Technology and technology breeds crime it always has and it always will and there will always be people willing to use technology in a negative self-serving way so you know in order for me to print checks 50 years ago I needed a Heidelberg printing press the press cost a million dollars it was 90 feet long with 18 feet high you had to do color separations negatives and plates and typesetting and use chemicals today you open a laptop you go to a corporate website your capture their logo you put it on a check in color you design this beautiful four color check in 15 minutes you use a color printer you go down the stationery store buy check paper and you print out this beautiful check we live in way too much information world as well you know 50 years ago if I was forging say a pan am a corporate cheque I didn't know where Pan Am bank I had no idea of knowing that I didn't know their account number and I certainly didn't know who the authorized signer of those cheques was today once you create that check you just call your victim because your victim in a too much information world tells you everything you need so if I call my victim and ask to speak to someone in accounts receivables and tell them that I'm getting ready to pay an invoice and want to wire them the funds they're going to say to me we bank a SunTrust Bank here's our account number and they give me all that information I need if I ask for a copy of their annual report on page 3 is a signature of the chairman of the board the CEO the CFO white glossy paper black ink camera they are scan it digitize it put on the check so the simplicity of the crime has also made fraud a lot easier to do than when I did it today it doesn't require a lot of skill or knowledge and to do it information is everywhere and that's why people I have to smile sometimes because I deal with all these privacy issues and I try to tell people there really is no privacy I mean the government obviously knows everything about everybody you know and there are a lot of corporations that know a great deal of value for example if you're on Facebook every time you say I like or I don't like something on Facebook that gets kept and stored so after a little period of time I get to know your sexual orientation I get to know how you politically vote I get to know with your ethnic background is I get to know all this about you just because you go I like this restaurant I don't like this hotel I like this story I don't like this book all those likes make up a profile of you and then those marketeers use that information to sell your products so again it's information is everywhere it's a matter of keeping the important information as secure and out of the hands of people who would use it in a negative way one I think we need to do a better job of educating the public you know it's amazing to me that back in the night late 1970s before I ever wrote a book there was a movie about me no one knew I existed I did a bunch of public service ads for the Department of Justice they were very well filmed there were six or seven of them they were kind of cute 30-second pieces and then the apartment of Justice gave him to all the police departments all over the country and you could be sitting in Tulsa Oklahoma and up pop this 30-second dance that brought to you by the ELSA Police Department but it was a message about protecting your credit cards protecting your personal income today there are no public service ads that you see out there from the government or the private sector educating and alighting people to what's going on in the 80s I did a lot of bank statement stuffers and now you don't see bank statement stuff is anymore unless they're selling a product to somebody so I think the government needs to do a much better job of helping educate the public we fortunately live in a country where the majority of people are honest so being honest they're they're easy to deceive because and so they somebody calls them and solicits and information they don't think anything about it even an employee of the government or someone else because they don't know what would someone do with that information I don't see any harm in telling them that when you explain to them this is what they do with it this is why they asked you those questions then people start to realize you know I understand that now I'm not going to do that a perfect example is when I ask you the last four digits of your social security number and you feel confident saying what would they do with that so you say to me to 901 and in the gist of the conversation I might say to you know I detected a little southern accent you must be from the south oh yeah I was born and raised in South Carolina oh you know you're about my age and I said well I'm actually 38 well you just told me where you were born the year you were born well that's the first three digits of your social security number so now I just have two digits to manipulate well when you educate someone about then they say I'm not answering those questions and some but they have to know that and there's not a real good source I write a lot of books but they're business-to-business books sometimes they're directed to the consumer but you can't get everybody to read your book so it's very but I think the government should do a better job of trying to get those messages out there and educate people well unfortunately I've only seen crime get easier it gets it's much more difficult to detect and certainly it's become much more global so you're dealing with a criminal in Moscow or criminal over in Iraq where you really don't have the ability to just go arrest that person I've learned to my career that you can't rely on the police you can't rely on the government you can't rely on the bank to protect you you have to be a little wiser consumer you have to be a little smarter consumer you have to be a little smarter businessperson than you did say 40 years ago in order to protect us that protect yourself of course the FBI has gone through tremendous changes where we're at one point fighting criminal cases like bank robbery and kidnapping and things of embezzlement and things of that nature - now terrorism so having to defend the country from an outside threat so it's been a complete change and obviously the the Bureau has had to adjust and is doing a very good job of that with bring in younger agents in who now like my own son who deals strictly with counterintelligence issues well all his life he'll be a counterintelligence agent and he won't do kidnappings and bank robberies he'll just concentrate on terrorism so they're starting to specialize in their field and I think those have all been things that've that come along I think you know overall the government does a great job but it takes time it can't be done overnight and it takes a great deal of Education and educating people and I think that's the only thing that I would like to see the government do a better a better job of as you may know last year the IRS paid out over five billion dollars in tax refunds to people who filed using somebody else's name this is not the fault of the IRS this is not the fault of the system the IRS uses it's the fault of people in Congress telling the IRS when I apply electronically you need to immediately make that payment to that person and the IRS in turn says I don't have the physical capability of doing that without investigating is that a legitimate refund for me to make I can legitimize it but I need one or two weeks to legitimize that that person is who they say they are before I mail them that refund but because I tie their hands to the that we do a lot of things that are kind of stupid we hurt ourselves that we should look better about protecting our taxpayers money than worrying about whether I get my refund in 14 days or in two days

Channel: FedScoop

Views: 41,235

Rating: 4.7931032 out of 5

Keywords: Frank Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can, FedScoop, ID Theft, Fraud, frank abagnale (author), protect yourself against fraud, frank abagnale conman, frank w. abagnale interview, identity fraud, frank w. abagnale big think, frank w. abagnale bigthink, frank abagnale jr, abagnale frank, frank w. abagnale, frank william abagnale, identity theft, abagnale, fraud protection, check fraud

Id: psvytm0baj4

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2013