(gentle music) - Frank Abagnale,
thanks for joining us on Prairie Pulse, a pleasure to have
you with us today. - Thank you,
pleasure to be here. - Before we get
into our discussion I just want to read a bit
from a brief bio of you to sort of set the scene here, because your life
is very interesting. Frank W. Abagnale is
one of the world's most respected authorities
on forgery, embezzlement, and secure documents. For over 40 years he has
worked with, advised, and consulted with hundreds
of financial institutions, corporations, and government
agencies around the world. Mr. Abagnale's rare blend
of knowledge and expertise began more than 45 years
ago when he was known as one of the world's most
famous confidence men. Any holes we should fill
in in that brief bio? - People I know are
fascinated by what I did between 16 and 21. I'm 70 and so when I
look back on my life I'm fascinated by the
fact that I did it. Served my time in prison,
I've worked for the FBI for four decades and
have spent my entire life dealing with fighting
crime and educating people about dealing with
all types of crimes. Been married to my one and
only wife for 40-plus years. Three sons, five grandchildren. A son who's an FBI agent. A kind of amazing
other side of my life than the side people
know from the movie. - [Doug] Well those
five years from 16 to 21 were filled with some very
interesting adventures. You impersonated an
airline pilot, a physician, an attorney, and a
federal prisons agent. So let's talk about
the pilot one, just to set the scene for how
you did this kind of thing. - Well you know,
people always say that they thought I was
brilliant when in fact I was just an adolescent, so
I had no fear of being caught. I never premeditated anything. I had ran away from home
at 16, back in the '60s a lot of kids ran away from
home but they got caught up in Haight-Ashbury, the
hippie scene, the drug scene. I ended up on the
streets in New York and didn't have any money,
I kind of quickly realized that as long as people
believed I was 16 I wasn't going to get anywhere. So the first thing I did was
alter my driver's license. Back then didn't
have a photo on it. It was just an IBM card
so I altered one digit of my date of birth. I was actually born in April
of 1948, I dropped the four, converted it to it three. So that made me 26 years old. And I started writing checks. I had an account,
when the money ran out I kept writing the
checks to support myself. And one day I was
walking down the street and I saw an airline
crew come out of a hotel, and I thought to myself if
I could get that uniform, then when I walked into a bank it would give so
much more credibility to asking to cash a check. And that was the sole purpose
of it, nothing more than that. So I was able to finagle
getting a uniform, once I got the
uniform I realized that you could
actually board planes and ride on planes for
free in the jump seat. So I did that and I was
able to stay in hotels and bill the
airline for my room. So by the two
years from 16 to 18 I flew in more than 260 aircraft in more than 62 countries
around the world. Just riding the jump seat
and posing as a pilot. But it started out as more
of a front for the checks and then every
time I moved along something else would come up and I was somewhat
of an opportunist, so I saw it as an
opportunity and I took that to the next step. - [Mill] Was there a
thrill in it for you? - Not so much the thrill
as a more of a survival and running from the law
and how to avoid the law. I could travel around the
world without a passport on an airline crew card. There were a lot of reasons
I did it other than just, I don't think there was
ever really a thrill, it was more about just staying
one step ahead of the law and staying one step
of trying to survive. - Were you ever in the cockpit? - Many many times, most of
the time in the cockpit, but in the jump seat. I was smart enough
never to ride on Pan Am, which was the pilot
I was posing as, because I was always afraid someone would start asking
me questions about who I knew and where I was based. So I always rode
on other carriers. And then I also knew
they would never ask me to do any function
in the cockpit, since I was a pilot riding the
jump seat on another carrier. So I always put
those things in place so that I didn't get
myself in a situation I couldn't get out of. - [Doug] Well, you impersonated
a physician as well, so how did you protect
other people from yourself? - Again, the same thing,
I moved to Atlanta, and I moved into an
apartment complex. On the application
it asked profession, so I didn't want to
put airline pilot because the police
were looking for me, so I put down doctor
and left it at that. Had a very inquisitive
apartment manager who asked me what
kind of doctor I was, so I said pediatrician because
it was a singles complex and there were no
children there. And then the next thing you
know I met a pediatrician who lived there. I got to know him he took
me up to the hospital to meet people. And then one day he
asked me if I would mind covering a shift at the
hospital for two weeks while a doctor had gone
home because of a death, and that it was an
administrative position, didn't have to treat anybody. And so again I saw it
more as a challenge to see if I could get
away with doing it, so I went to the hospital
and worked in the hospital. In the hospital and the lawyer,
no one really ever doubted I was not that person, it
was I who left on my own. - [Doug] Nobody said,
here's an emergency, it's time for you to-- - No, because it was mainly
an administrative position, so I kind of just administrated
the staff on my shift, so it wasn't a very
difficult thing to do. - [Doug] Well, you were
ultimately apprehended at a pretty tender age, 21. - Yes.
- In Europe. - I was arrested by
the French police when I was 21 years old, actually on an Interpol
warrant from the Swedish police who were looking for me
for forgery in Sweden, but they believed I
was living in France. But when the French authorities
took me into custody on the Swedish warrant they
realized I had forged checks all over France, so they
refused to honor the warrant and they requested
my extradition. And they later
convicted me of forgery and sent me to French prison. I eventually served
my time in France, was extradited to Sweden, where I served time in
a Swedish penitentiary in Malmo, Sweden. When my sentence was up,
US federal authorities took custody of me, returned
me to the United States, and eventually a United
States federal judge in Atlanta Georgia sentenced me to 12 years in federal prison. I served about four
years of those 12 years at a federal prison in
Petersburg, Virginia. When I was 26 years old
the government offered to take me out of prison
on the condition I'd go to work with an agency
of the federal government for the remainder of my sentence or until my parole
had been completed. I agreed and I've spent the
last four decades at the FBI. - So you're put in
prison at the age of 21. And ultimately you come out
of prison helping the FBI and the federal government. How did that happen? - Two reasons, at the time,
this was right after Hoover, Clarence Kelly was the
director of the Bureau. I think one, to teach
agents at the academy where I've taught
for four decades now. I had to go out in the
field and teach agents how to think out of the box, how to look at things not
just as black and white, how to deal with
social engineering, so that they can use
it in a legal way to gather information. And also in the first
part of my career I did a lot of undercover work, mainly because the
bureau could say to me I need you to be this
particular person, a lieutenant in the Army. Your expertise is this
particular missile. I need you to know
enough about it to go onto this base and
find out what's going on about whatever it
might be the event. So I think a lot of it was
all of those things combined. I don't think they ever
dreamed or I ever dreamed I would stay there more than
the allotted time of my parole, but when my parole was up
and the court order was over, they asked me to
stay and I stayed and have been there ever since. - In the course of your
doing time in prison and subsequently working
with the federal government on various security
issues have you ever, over the course of your life, had the occasion to sort of
look inwardly and ask yourself why did I do this? - I think it was just
more about being a runaway and then thinking
about how to survive, and those kind of things. I think it was more about that
there was no real motivation to want to be a pilot, be
a doctor, or be a lawyer. All of those things I
fell into, the lawyer, I met a girl whose father
was the Attorney General in Louisiana and I
ended up telling her I had a law degree. As I went to Louisiana
I actually took the bar, I passed the bar, so I
practiced law there for a while. I think it was all a matter
of just going on knowing that sooner or later
I would get caught. I always knew I'd get caught,
it was just a matter of time. But it was just a matter of
how long I could stretch it out and how long I could
just keep going along and just encountered things. And again very much
an opportunist, very much an adolescent who
had no fear of being caught. Didn't think of
the consequences. Didn't premeditate anything, if I was standing out
in front of a bank with a check for $500,
I didn't have a plan, I didn't say I was going to
go in and if they say this I'll do this if they
do that I'll do that. I just simply went
in and did it, so everything was kind
of ad-libbed and I think that was very much
the adolescent. But I think the adolescent was
why I was successful at it. Had I been a little
smarter, a little older, I think I would have
started to rationalize and say you'll never get away
with that, you can't do that, and I probably
wouldn't have done half the things that I did. - [Doug] Well it sounds
like you were following the KISS principle, the keep
it simple principle here, in terms of hoodwinking people. Is that your message when you're talking to
people in law enforcement, don't get too complicated? - Yeah a lot of it is, you
know my career has changed in the 40 years that I've
worked with the Bureau. I started out dealing with
counterfeits and forgeries and embezzlement,
financial crimes. The last 20 years,
my whole career has been about cyber-related
crimes and the Internet and breaches and so
I've had to change just as crime has changed. I've had to learn how
criminals commit those crimes and then find out how to do
the investigative end of that and how to teach agents how
to look into those crimes. So my career's changed
a lot in the 40 years just as crime has changed because it's constantly
changing every day. So a good example is I've
spent the last 40 years, when I do go outside
the government to speak, mainly to banks, financial
institutions, corporations. I think when I was in
North Dakota in '08, I was here for US Bank, and they invited their
corporate customers, came back in '14 for
the Chamber of Commerce because the United
States attorney asked me to come and do a presentation
for all the businesses here. But in the last of four years
I've got involved very much with crimes against the elderly. And so I've been working
very closely with AARP. And they take me out
about 15 times a year, we've been to about
38 states now, to reach thousands of people
and basically seniors mostly, to teach them about how not to
be hoodwinked by these scams, sweepstakes scams, Internet
scams, grandparent scams, all kinds of telephone
robo-call scams. So I'm a big believer,
and I've always been in all the books I've
written over my career, all revolve around education
being the most powerful tool to fighting crime. So I think it's simply
if you explain to people how the scam works, when
they get that next phone call they get that next
letter or the next email, they know how to deal with that. - [Doug] If it sounds
too good to be true it probably is.
- That's right. - You have a company,
Abagnale and Associates, and you specialize in
financial fraud consultancy. You're in North Dakota visiting
Fargo because of the AARP and the Fargo Moorhead West
Fargo Chamber of Commerce. What are the central messages
you share with your clients? - Well, two things
we'll do here tonight because a lot of our
audience will be businesses invited by the Chamber
and regular folks
and seniors as well so it'll be an
awareness program, this will be a
PowerPoint presentation where I will talk about
identity theft and breaches and protecting your
identity and the Internet and social media and how
to protect your children on social media, so it's pretty
much an awareness program so that people walk away
with a lot of information about a lot of different things not only to protect their
business, protect their family, protect their children but
also protect their assets. And it'll be entertaining
but very educational and will give them
the necessary tools to take back and use. And what I do is
I have a website, it's just my name, abagnale.com, obviously I sell no products,
I provide no services. It is strictly an
educational site. So we refer people to that because there's so much
information to cover, you can't cover it in a seminar whether it's two or
three hours long. So we refer people to
pamphlets and booklets that I write constantly
and put up there that people can use from
everything from check forgery to identity theft,
embezzlement, whatever it is that they are concerned
about they can go there and research it and
get information. - [Doug] Well if
there's anything that scares a senior citizen, and I'm on the brink of it too, and that is my assets,
how secure are they. All my banking's online,
my retirement is online. How vulnerable am I? - Well you know any any
system can be breached, there is no foolproof system. We've obviously had many
many breaches reported and unreported from
very sophisticated
technology companies that have been breached. So I wouldn't say it's
impossible for someone to breach the bank but
I will say that banks and financial institutions as
a whole do a much better job than the federal government,
the state government, the county government,
the city government does in protecting people's
assets and information. You take a bank like
City National Bank or Chase in Manhattan, they spend about a
half a billion dollars
a year, every year on technology to
keep criminals out. They're constantly staying one
step ahead of the criminals, understand what they're
doing and they have a lot of fail safe programs
in place to protect them. We don't have that, we have
an infrastructure today with electrical grid that
hasn't been updated in 25 years. There's a lot of weak
spots in our government. Our Medicare and
Medicaid last year paid out $200 billion
in fraudulent claims to criminals who lived in other
countries around the world. $200 billion, that's 10%
of Medicare and Medicaid's annual budget went to criminals. So the government does
a very horrible job of protecting information. So I would say that you're
in much better hands, it's not anything foolproof, but you're much better
hands with your bank than you would be
with the government. - There are lots of scams
that involve senior citizens, and they evolve over time, but maybe you could share with
our viewers some of the scams that are current and
what they should do. - I use very simple
rules, so for example the most common scams
we have right now, one is called the
grandparent scam. So the telephone rings, you
walk over to the caller ID, and it says it's the
Fargo Police Department. So you pick it up
because you believe it is the Fargo
Police Department. One of the simplest things
to manipulate is caller ID. Someone says that they're
Sergeant So-and-So with the Fargo
Police Department, they've arrested your grandson
for DWI on Interstate 94. And they describe
his car to you, they describe the
name of his girlfriend that was riding in
the car with him. All the details, and then
simply tell you that he asked us not to call his parents,
he asked us to call you. He'll have to spend
the weekend in jail before he sees a judge
unless he post bail in the next couple of hours. Of course the grandparent
says, oh how much is the bail, you know, $500, and you can
give us a credit card number and we can release him. And it's amazing how
many, unfortunately
millions of people, fall for that every day. So if you explain
that to anyone, whether they are a
senior or a millennial, and you tell them
how the scam works, the next time that call comes
and that information comes about your grandson or
someone's in custody, they know smart enough
to hang up the phone, pick up the phone book, look
up the Fargo Police Department in the phone book, call
the police department, and ask them if they
placed that call. That takes two
minutes to do that. So I'm a big believer
in stop, verify. If you get a phone call from
the IRS and you're concerned that it is a real call, the IRS
really doesn't call anybody, but if you do get a
call from the IRS, then just simply
hang up the phone, again go to the phone book, don't call the number
back they gave you. Look up the IRS, call the
IRS, tell them you received that phone call, and of
course they'll tell you that that's a fictitious
fraudulent call. So it doesn't take but a
minute to stop and verify, and that's what I tell
people is the solution to most all of these scams. - [Doug] Well, a
common scam years ago, and it keeps coming
around in some variation, is the Nigerian windfall. The email that
comes to me saying there's all this money
that might come my way with a modest investment. - Yeah, and they've
moved along from that, you know the Nigerians years
ago people used to ask me how they sent out thousands
and thousands of letters, who paid the postage
for the stamps. And I told them that the
stamps were all counterfeit. So they paid nothing for
fraudulent stamps from Nigeria. The difference
today with that scam is you used to send
out 10,000 letters and hope that 1/10th
of 1% would respond. Today, through the
Internet, you could send out 10 million letters,
and again you only need 1/10th of 1% to respond. So it's basically
the same scam again. And all these scams, as I tell people, the
same way in a love scam, someone might have met
someone on the Internet, they've been involved for
six months talking to them back and forth on the Internet, they've spoken to
them on the phone. They never met them personally, they tell them they live in the
next state over in Minnesota or wherever they might be. And one day out of the
clear blue they say well, I'd come and see you but I
have to have an operation. I don't have the money for it and if I don't have the
operation I might, you know, might lose my life. Oh well, how much is the
operation, well it's $35,000. Well I'll give you the money. So the minute someone
asks you for money or someone asked
you for information, social security
number, date of birth, bank account information, that's when the red
flag should go up. So there are obvious
red flags in every scam. And if you learn to
spot those red flags that's when you need to
end that relationship end that conversation and know that there's actually a scam
being perpetrated against you. - [Doug] There's a sort of an
emotional involvement here, too though, some of these scams, and even the ones you
talked about yourself, becoming an attorney
because your girlfriend, there was some sort
of a connection there. How good are fraud
artists, con men, at sort of reading people? - They're very good and people, you know I have two incidences,
my neighbor next to me, and again I live
in South Carolina. Her mother lives in Iowa. Her husband worked for John
Deere for years and he retired and passed away, she's 70. Very intelligent woman. Her daughter came over
to me because she said my mother's been getting
a phone call from a guy that says he's an ex-FBI agent, and that he would investigate, she had lost some money
on some scam in Jamaica, and he would investigate it. And he said he was retired
because he had been shot and she asked me if I
could check that out. So I told her right off the top, I said no FBI agent's been shot. So I said but give me his
name and I'll find it out. So I came back and said to
her there is no FBI agent by that name or has there
ever been an FBI agent by that name retired
or otherwise. So she told her mother
and her mother said, when she confronted the guy
the guy said well really I'm not an FBI
agent I'm a private
investigator in Maryland, and I just said that. So again her
daughter came to me. I said let me just
talk to your mother, so I got her mother
on the phone. I said look I called the
Attorney General's office in Maryland, I know
him personally. He said there is nobody licensed
in that state by that name. So obviously this guy's just trying to get
money out of you. So whatever you do don't
give him any money, OK? Because he's not
who he says he is. And the next thing I
know, she said he said no, it's not Maryland,
it's actually New York. So I checked one more
time for her in New York and I said I'm not
gonna check anymore, but don't send
this guy any money, he's not who he says he is. Next thing I know he tells
her I need to come see you to investigate the case, but you have to
send me the airfare. She sent $1,200, said he'd meet her like an
hour from where she lives in a small town in
Iowa, in Des Moines. And he never showed up. I have another incident where
a friend of mine's father, who was a very
intelligent gentleman who owned a huge corporation
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he retired. And he was sending money because he said he won Mercedes Benz
but you have to pay the tax. And he kept sending money
every time he'd send the money then they'd say send more money. And his son kept telling him,
Dad you've sent more money than a Mercedes cost. First of all, you have enough
money to go buy 10 Mercedes, you want to go buy a
Mercedes go buy one. But you've already
sent these people, and he kept sending them money. So yes, a lot of
people get caught up, and those are the ones
that are very frustrating and difficult to deal with because no matter
what tell them, no matter how much
evidence you give them, they're so emotionally involved they still go on with the scam. - [Doug] Well we also live
in a brave new world here of social media, where a lot
of our identifying information is readily available to
somebody who wants to do even a cursory
search of Facebook or some other social
media platform. - Absolutely, I'm not on
any social media, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, I don't
do any of those things. But that is why we're seeing such sophisticated
phishing scams now. The kind of scams we see
now is an email that says, hi Karen, great having
lunch with you today. We need to do that
again more often. I hope you and your husband
Robin have a great time at Disney World with
the kids this week. When you get back give me a
call we'll do lunch again. By the way, I saw
this on YouTube and I thought you'd enjoy
it, here is the link. Signed, Joan. That's because she
already said on Facebook she was going to lunch, she
already said her friend's name, she said her husband's
name several times, they said they were
going to Disney World. They use all of that to
establish credibility, so that when you get that
email you think this must be, who else would it be,
must be my friend. So yes, there's a tremendous
amount of information given away on social media. If you tell someone
on social media, whether it be Facebook
or whatever it might be, where you were born
and your date of birth, that's 98% I need to
steal your identity. I only need to know
those two things. So if on your Facebook
page you told me that, that's all I need to know. If you post a
straight photograph of
yourself on Facebook I can capture that image of you, I can use it on
phony identification, and also through
facial recognition they can research your photo
and go to your Facebook page, through facial recognition. So I always tell young people, you're gonna put
a photo up there, you put a photo of
you and your friends, and your arm's around them,
you're playing soccer, you have your dog. You don't have a straight-on
photograph of yourself. I also remind a
lot of young people that what you say on
Facebook stays on Facebook, whether you erase it, delete
it, or you close your account, it'll always be there. So if the government's
going to hire tomorrow they are going to
your Facebook page, and if there's a picture
of you nude on the beach with a bunch of
drug paraphernalia
all over your body, and wine bottles
and whiskey bottles, they're not gonna hire you. If you're 12 years old and
you make a racial slur, your employer will
read it when you're 21. University of North Dakota
will read it at admissions. If you say something about
someone's sexual orientation because you're 14 and
don't know any better, someone's going to read it. So I always remind young
people before you post, before you say something,
you need to ask yourself, do I want someone to read
this five years from now, 10 years from now,
because they will. - You mentioned you don't
have any social media identity out there, but
everybody seems to have some sort of an
online relationship that requires a password. How safe is a password? I mean some people use the
word password, or 123456. How safe are the ways that we try to protect
our security online? - Great question,
but first of all, passwords are for tree houses. It is just absurd that we
are using passwords today. Passwords are actually
a 1964 technology, before I ever did anything, that we're using in 2018. So had you read a lot of things that I've written
over the years, it's simply trying to
get away from passwords. We need to eliminate
the use of passwords. So for the last five years
I've worked as an adviser to a technology
company called Trusona, which is out in
Scottsdale, Arizona. It stands for true
persona, of a person. And Trusona is the
technology that does in fact eliminate the need
for passwords. So within the next couple of
years, two or three years, you will see passwords go away. Big financial institutions
are adopting that technology, governments are
adopting the technology. And so when you go up to
an ATM you will basically just have your phone,
and when you pull up you will not need a card,
you will not need a password. You will be able to just
simply pull up your phone, press your app for your bank, and up will come a
little dot on the screen. You'll hold your phone up
and they'll know it's you. You won't have to
enter any passwords. Delta for example
is using that now with they're 80,000 employees,
there's no passwords between their employees
and the company. So they vet it and then they
will eventually put it out into the market for their
millions of flying customers. However they will always
start out by saying to you on your home screen, do
you want to use a password? No, no password, so
you'll have the option of using your password or
not using your password, but eventually I
think you'll see the whole password go away. And we absolutely
need to do that, we need to get rid of passwords. - Well some banks or some
institutions these days are using biometrics
like a finger tip or facial recognition. - I'm not a big fan
on biometrics, and
I'll explain why. If I take a picture of
you on your iPhone 10, and your image, or I
take your fingerprint, or I take your eye scan, biometrics means that I've
taken that digital image and I've converted it
to numbers and letters, a series of long
numbers and letters. If I can capture those
long numbers and letters then I can replay them
again and do the same thing, I can become you, I
can be the retina, I can be the fingerprint,
I can be you on the iPhone. We know replay is a
very common thing. So for example when
Trusona was invented the people at Trusona when I
got involved with them I said, unless you first start out
by inventing anti-replay, which no one has done, don't
even go down this path. Because as long as I can
replay whatever it is you did on your
phone, I can be you. So the whole concept was
to develop anti-replay, and that's what we did first
and then we developed Trusona. So biometrics can be
replayed just like a wire the bank sends, a company sends
a wire tomorrow, their CFO, for $20 million, I
capture that wire data, I can replay it again and
resend another $20 million. So you have to have anti-replay
technology to prevent that, and in biometrics
we don't have that. - [Doug] You mentioned
that financial institutions typically have the the highest
level of security these days. We have had some
really fundamentally
troubling breaches, Equifax for example. Sort of backs up that
financial institutions with very important data. Is it realistic to
think that my data isn't out there
already somewhere? - No, I think it is, I believe
that everyone's information's already been stolen,
we've had billions, literally billions
of personal names and information breached. I am a strong believer
that 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 actually don't
cause breaches, people do. So in the case of
Equifax they failed to update their internal system. They failed to
import their patches that Microsoft sent them
and told them to install. They did a horrible job of doing
the security infrastructure and consequently they
allowed hackers to get in. And like in every breach
it always starts out with a low number,
they said 140 million, that it was 142 million,
then 145 million, now it's 148 million. It's probably more than 200
million pieces of information and data have been
stolen from Equifax. And that's just one
of many breaches. We have Yahoo, it had a
half a billion breaches. There have been so many
names and information, one would have to assume
that their identity has already been
stolen and out there. Yes, but I always remind
people that every breach occurs for that reason. So during the month of
October was we refer that as Cyber Awareness Month. So every day for the last
five years, five days a week I am at a fortune
500 company in house, Monday through Friday,
somewhere in the United States, during the month of October. So I think last year I
finished up at Google, at their corporate headquarters,
and the day before that I was at Nationwide Insurance, which is in Columbus Ohio. Now they have 15,000 people
at Nationwide on their campus, so when I go there I
have to spend a day, I have to go to the
auditorium, the cafeteria, keep speaking to people. My message to them is that the
most important job they have, whether they're the
janitor or the CEO, is to protect the information
that's been entrusted to them by their clients. So when I get out
to those companies I have a little thing I do, I don't park in the
visitor parking lot. I park in the
employee parking lot. When I get out of the
car empty my pockets of some memory sticks
that say confidential. And I throw them all
over the grounds. I have a tracing device
on them so at lunch time in the cafeteria I open it
up to see how many employees went to see what it said. And it says, "This is
a test and you failed." But in five years, at
hundreds of companies, I have yet to have
that not happen. Someone's gonna go look. Later I explain to them that I
could have cost their company a billion dollars overnight and destroyed their
100-year old brand. So there is nothing
more important again than educating
employees in a company about protecting the
information and data that's been entrusted to
them by their their clients or their citizens or
whoever it may be. - [Doug] So just picking
up that memory stick, putting it in your
company computer, unloads maybe a program-- - Right, that's it. Going to a link that came up because a friend
sent you something, you believe it's your friend. There are so many
of those things, 99% of malware
comes from phishing. So they're all by emails
or somebody telling you to do something that you're
probably not supposed to do. - [Doug] Equifax of course
went on the offensive, in terms of its PR
protection, to let people know that they were
going to help them determine the depth
of the problem they might personally have. In my case there was going
to be a deep Internet search of whether or not my
social security number, my phone number, some other
data, of my email address, was broadly available. I came up clean but somehow
I don't feel secure. - I kind of felt that
the whole Equifax thing, what they did post-breach
was a little bit unethical. So first of all they
immediately came out and said that they will provide one year
of credit monitoring service for free, so millions of
people went and signed up for Equifax credit
monitoring service. Then as the year passed
they came back and said, well nothing's really
came up yet so we suggest you sign up for this
service, it's $15 a month or $20 a month. So they made millions
and millions of dollars. I thought that was very
unethical on their part and basically took advantage
of people and their fear. One thing is that when
you breach a company, if it's a retail environment
such as Home Depot or Target, and you're stealing
credit card numbers and debit card numbers you
have to get rid of that right away, it has a
very short shelf life. When you breach someone like
an Equifax you're stealing data that is name, social security
number, date of birth. You can't change your name, you can't change your
social security number, and you can't change
your date of birth. So the longer I hold that data the more valuable it becomes
when I go to sell it. So in those types of
breaches we usually find about a four-year lag because they warehouse
that information. So in reality we
haven't even been to see what's going to
happen with Equifax and the information that
was stolen off of Equifax. We're just now seeing the
South Carolina breach, the Target breach,
the Home Depot breach. When it came to personal
data such as name, social security
number, date of birth, because they can hold
that for so long. So we don't really know
the damage of Equifax. Now, here's the thing. What's really bad
about all of this is whether it be Equifax,
Experian, TransUnion, you never gave the credit bureau permission to have
your information. There's not one single
thing you signed that said hey, you
can store all my data, and you can make
billions of dollars selling it to credit purposes,
background checks, etc., insurance, etc.,
you never said that. So I think that you and every
citizen, including myself, should have the right
to freeze their credit. And we should be able to say
no, you can't use my credit unless I give you permission to give that
information to someone. So up until this year
only eight states allowed you to
freeze your credit without charging you a fee. All the other states
required a fee, could be $10 to freeze
it, $15 to unfreeze it, $10 to freeze it back again. So not only was it
costly but for seniors it became very troublesome
and very involved in trying to keep up on
whether they froze it, they didn't freeze it. So for two years I
testified before Congress asking the government,
the federal government, to actually take it
and make it continuous throughout all the 50 states, so we had continuity. And that no credit bureau
in any of the 50 states could charge you to
freeze your credit, unfreeze your credit,
freeze your credit again. I'm happy to say that
Congress created the bill, they passed the bill, the
President signed the bill, and on September 1st of
this year, all 50 states, citizens will be able
to freeze their credit and then unfreeze it
and freeze it again at no cost to do so. And so if you were a senior
and you're 78 years old, you own your house,
you own your cars, you have credit cards, you're
not looking for any credit. You need to freeze your credit, there's no reason for
you to have your credit floating out there. If I'm a young man or
woman, I'm in the military, I'm getting sent overseas for
two years, to Afghanistan. I freeze my credit, I have
no reason to use my credit while I'm overseas
thousands of miles away. So freezing your credit
is the best option. And now you'll be
able to do that. And if you were 78
and you wanted to buy
a washer and dryer, but you wanted to finance it from the local
appliance company, then you go down and simply say I'm going to unfreeze my
credit to ABC Appliance, so they can give me this
washer and dryer on credit. And then freeze it back, they're
the only ones can see it. And that's an ability we
didn't have before we have now. - [Doug] So this would
be a much simpler process than it currently-- - Than it currently is. And no cost involved. - [Doug] You mentioned, you
suggested the commoditization of this information, this
kind of dark Internet world that's out there were personal
data is literally sold to other people
for nefarious uses. And that it might be
years down the road before my information
makes me vulnerable. That's scary. - It is very scary. And you know this is not new, years ago it used to be
what we called chat rooms, where we'd monitor
these chat rooms and we see them selling
all these driver's license, mother's maiden
names, dates of birth, bank account information. Now you have the dark web where
they're doing the same thing but they're doing
it much bigger bulk. But yes, when you have
one of these big breaches, always keep in mind
that information, so when someone says to you
well what we're gonna do is offer you one-year credit
monitoring service for free, nothing's gonna
happen in a year. First of all you've
already told the criminal, I've given all these people
credit monitoring for one year, so as a criminal I'm gonna
go OK, well then for one year I'm not gonna do anything. So one year of credit
monitoring would be worthless, you would always need at
least three or four years of credit monitoring to make
sure you're not picked up and victimized by it. - [Doug] Frank Abagnale
is an author, a lecturer, and a financial
fraud consultant. And your story, we started
talking about your life history, those formative five
years from 16 to 21 that launched a career
helping people ultimately. But your story was
told in a movie. And a Broadway musical,
Catch Me if I Can. - Catch Me if You Can. - [Doug] What was
that experience like, having your story told
in a different way. - You know I didn't
have I didn't have a lot to do with the movie, but
I thought it was great that it was Steven
Spielberg who did it. He loved the story because
of how the story ended out, and how my life turned out. So he held the
rights for 20 years, back when he was making
Jaws he bought the rights. So Barbara Walters asked
him in an interview, why did you wait 20
years to make this movie? And he said well,
I waited to see what the real Frank
Abagnale did with his life before I immortalized
him on film. So I think it was, he loved
that part of the story, and he wanted the
world to know it. So I was very fortunate that
it was he who made the movie. I thought he did a great
job of telling the story. Broadway did a great job of
telling the story to music. I was very fortunate,
Leonardo DiCaprio, who did an amazing
job, he took the role when he was 27, 28 years old, and portrayed the part
of a 16 year old boy. Did an amazing, he's a
great character actor. Had people like Tom Hanks
and Christopher Walken, so they had an amazing cast. But I thought they
did a great job. So if you're gonna have
to have your story told, I was very fortunate it was he
who told the world the story. - How has Catch Me if
You Can, the movie, affected your life? - I get asked quite often, how did the movie
change my life. And the truth is I do
the same thing today that I did years ago. The only difference is I
get paid more money to do it and people want to take
their picture with me. I don't know how many
thousands of pictures I've taken with people. You know I had
written five books, I had been on the lecture
series for years and years. No one ever asked to
have a photo with me. Now everywhere I go, in
the airport wherever I am, someone wants take
a picture with me. So I think that has a lot to
do what people have cameras, and social media, they want
to put it up on social media. So I always say, my
sons always remind me, you know Dad you tell people
you're not on social media, but if you type in Frank
Abagnale on Twitter there are 10,000 people
that are Frank Abagnale, and the same way on a Facebook. - [Doug] Well what is the
next stage of your story? You're a senior
citizen now, too. - Yes. So I'll probably, as
the FBI always ask me when am I gonna retire,
because they don't want me to, I always tell them that as
long as I can go out and speak and sound of mind and
physically capable of getting on airplanes
and traveling every day, I'll continue to do this, I'll continue to
teach at the academy, I'll be there on
August 1st again. I will do that as long
as I'm physically able to and I don't start slurring my
words or something like that. Then I'll know it's time to
quit, but until that time comes I'll just continue
doing what I'm doing. - [Doug] And are
you proselytizing, if you're standing in
a line in and airport, if you're at a table
in a restaurant and somebody suggests something that sounds too good to be true, does does your impulse kick in? - Yeah absolutely, you know
you gave a perfect example, the airport. So I travel every day, I'm
in and out of the airport once or twice a day. So I watch people go
through the airport line and I realized that there
might be 19 TSA officers there but the truth is I only
need to get to one of them. So if I can get to one of
them because of lack of ethics or character in their makeup, I win and the airport loses. So it's not a difficult
thing unfortunately. And then when I watch the
airline crews go through, they basically are just
waving their ID card. Now years ago it
took a lot of work to make one of those ID cards. Today you sit down at your
computer, you design it, you capture the logos,
you have a beautiful card, hologram, no hologram,
it doesn't matter. So I ask myself, is anyone
really looking at those cards and paying any attention
to those cards? So I don't know
that it would be, I always tell people
when they say well, could you do today what
you did 40 years ago? Yeah, it's thousands
of times easier today, because I didn't have the
technology 40 years ago to do the things
that are done today which make it so much easier. Technology breeds crime, it
always has, it always will. And there will always be
people using technology in a self-negative way. So yes it would be
a lot easier today, so some of those
things do scare me, because I realize that
someone could do that if they wanted to do it. - [Doug] So when you
go through the airport, you go through airport security, do you feel safer today, or? - No, I don't really feel any
safer going through there. Because I know that if someone
really had an intention of doing something
they could still get an airline pilot's uniform, they could still
make up an ID card, they could still finagle
their way somehow, through bribery or some way
to get through the airport, so I don't feel a
hundred percent safer. I do believe that it's such
an immense hindrance to travel and I think a lot of people
are unfairly picked out that shouldn't be searched. So it's a horrible way to live because of an incident
that the rest of life, my life and other generations will have to be
searched all the time. - [Doug] It's a
bit of a conundrum, there's I suppose some value
at having a show of security, and yet if you were advising
airport security operations, what kind of advice
would you give them? - Well for example
what I observe is the person that's
doing the screening, that's the person
watching the screen as the stuff goes
through the belt, there needs to be more
than one person there, because if I'm able
to get to that person that's really all
I need to get to. Because when I show my ID,
which would be a phony ID, and my boarding pass, and
I go over to the belt, whatever it is I have in my bag I just need that one
individual to ignore it. I'm gonna walk
through the screening because I don't
have anything on me. And if that one person
sees what's ever in the bag and ignores it because I
bribed them or whatever I did, and it gets through, I
pick up my bag and off I go and I get on the plane, no
one else is going to check it. So I don't like the fact that there's just one
person observing that. And once in while you'll
see them being trained, so there's a trainer behind
them, but most of the time they're doing that themselves. And obviously, unfortunately, we live in an extremely
unethical world today, where we don't teach
ethics at home, we don't teach ethics in school, we don't teach it
in the university, we don't teach it
in the workplace. So there is a tremendous
lack of character and ethics, and that's very scary when it
comes to those types of jobs. - [Doug] So, what about
your own upbringing? You had a father and mother. What were the ethical struggles
that you might have had? - Yeah, I think that, I had
not only a mother and father but I went to Catholic school most of my life
up to high school. I believe that sometimes
all of us go make mistakes and we go down the wrong path. But you have to have that
rope that's been given to you to pull yourself back
to the right path. I think my parents gave
me the right tools, I just went down the
wrong road, ran away, started to get into
a lot of trouble. But I had that rope that I
always knew I could reach for and pull myself back
on the right road. I think today there are
a lot of young people don't have that rope. So once they make that wrong
turn it's very difficult to get back onto the
onto the right road. - You've now spent
more than 40 years working with FBI
agents in training and other federal agencies. How many professional's lives do you think you've
touched over those years? - Well I know that I've taught
more than two generations of FBI agents, we have
13,000 FBI agents. Many of them all retired today that are very close
friends of mine that are retired agents I taught when they went
through the Academy. Agents have to retire
at 57 years old, so I've met many agents
who are now retired. My son is an FBI agent, he's celebrating 12
years in the Bureau. I taught him, he was in my class when he went
through the Academy. So yes, I was recently, on my website I
have a little clip from a US Senate committee,
about 12 senators, interviewing me, and the
senator from Oklahoma mentioned that I had trained
two generations of FBI agents during my career and that's
been a wonderful thing for me. - The FBI has had some
problems in its past, it was a bit problematic
around the Hoover years. And now there is concern
about whether or not the FBI is following
certain ethical guidelines in its dealings. How does that concern you? - Well, like in every
in every organization there are a few bad people. I truly believe that you
cannot be involved politically, you can have your
political thoughts, you cannot let them
interfere in your work. The 13,000 agents
that are out there, they don't let politics
interfere in their work. I think this was a
handful of people, who obviously now have
been fired and dismissed, but who let politics
get involved with
their decision-making and that was wrong. And you can't become political. And obviously you have to serve whatever president the
public puts in place. They're your president, you
have to serve the president, whether you like
them, don't like them, don't believe in their politics. That's not your decision
to make as an FBI agent. And when you investigate a
crime you investigate the crime based on facts and
information you've gotten. And as for the FBI and
their over 100 year history, their sole job, as they
remind people all the time, is only an investigative arm of the Department of Justice. So they investigate the crime, they bring the evidence
to the US attorney, or in this case the
Attorney General, say here's all the evidence. And the Attorney General
or the US Attorney makes a decision whether to
prosecute or not prosecute. So in my personal opinion, Director Comey should have never
ever made those statements. It was not his place to
make those statements. He should have simply said
to the Attorney General, I'm not doing that,
that's not my job. And if you force me
to do it, I'll resign, and that will look even worse
if I tell people why I resign. I think that was where it
all started, the mistake. He should have never done that. I think he was a
little more political. I not only knew Director
Muller very well but I traveled with
director Muller. He's a fine, ethical gentleman. And never once did I see
him in front of a camera. He avoided the news media,
he didn't talk to the press. If we were at a conference I
would go speak with the press, he didn't go speak
with the press. He was very much the
Director of the Bureau. And that's the way it should be. He didn't get
involved in comments, politically or otherwise. So I think it was a
change in directors and that was a problem
and I think hopefully they'll get this all cleared up, but it's no reflection
on the 13,000 agents, men and women who do
their job every day. - Well again you're
in North Dakota to talk about fraud,
particularly that that's perpetrated
on senior citizens. And you'll be talking to
business owners as well. We live in an age of security, where we are on line to bank, and on line to make purchases. What should we know
about our online presence that should concern us? - Well first of all, make sure
that you shred everything. So you got a catalog
yesterday from Macy's, you looked at it, wasn't
anything you wanted, so you threw it away. But on the back
cover of the catalog was your name and
address, your barcode, source code, ID number. That's all I need to become you. So you want to shred that. You went to the grocery
store and you wrote a check. On the check was your
name and address, phone number, bank's
name and address, account number at your bank, routing number
into your account, that you're wiring instructions. Signature on the signature
card at your bank. Then the clerk wrote down your North Dakota
driver's license number and your date of
birth on the front. You don't get the check back. We live in truncation so you
get an image of the check. The check goes to that company's
headquarters in Chicago where it sits in a
warehouse for 65 days and then they
physically destroy it. Anyone who would see
the face of that check could draft on
your bank account, wire money out of your account. So I don't get over paranoid,
I'm a little old-fashioned, I write a check to
pay the mortgage or write a check to pay a loan, but I'm very careful about
where I write a check. Because I'm actually
handing someone information with all
my banking information on a piece of paper. I don't own a debit card. I've never owned one, never allowed my three
sons to have one. A long time ago while writing
a book on financial security, I asked myself how would someone
remove 99.9% of their risk. And the answer was to use
the safest form of payment that exists on the
face of the earth. And that is a credit card. Credit card, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover card. Not a debit-credit
but a credit card. And every day of my life I spend the credit
card company's money. I never spend my money, my money sits in a money market
account, it earns interest. No one knows where it is because
it's not exposed to anyone. I only expose the credit
card company's money. I will do everything I
can to protect the card, but if someone gets my number and they charge a
million dollars on my
credit card tomorrow by federal law my liability
is zero, I have no liability. If I buy something online
and use my credit card and they don't deliver
it I'm covered. If I buy something
online and it comes broke and they refuse to take
it back, I'm covered. If I buy something online
from a fictitious website because I don't
know is fictitious and I never get it, I'm covered. Every time I pay my bill or
part of my bill every month, my credit score goes up, so I keep building credit
on my credit score. When you use a debit card
every time you reach for it you're exposing the money
in your bank account. The only money they gonna
steel is your money. So in every post-investigation,
Target, Home Depot, every one of those came
down to the simple question, what happened? Well, I had a Visa
card at Target so they just canceled my card, I think two days later FedEx
delivered me a new card. That was the last
I heard about it. Oh no, I had a debit
card, and they took $3,000 out of my checking account, and it took me two months
to get the $3,000 back while the bank said they
were investigating it. You do nothing for your
credit score whatsoever. If you could use that debit
card 20 times a day for 20 years your credit will
not move this much. So I had three sons that
went off to college. I said to them I'm not
giving you a debit card. I've actually applied for
a credit card in your name. So it's your card. Of course you're 18
you have no credit. So I had to guarantee the card. And that means three
things will happen. One, the bill comes to me,
I'm responsible for the bill. So if you're spending a
lot of time in the bar I'm gonna know it. Two, every time I pay the bill
it's gonna go on your credit. So five years from now,
four years from now, when you graduated from college you should have a credit
score of about 800. You want to buy a
car, buy a house, you can do that without
me you don't need me to do that for you. And of course I control
the limit on the card, so whatever I think you
need to spend every month, that'll be the
limit of the card. One of the best things you
can do for your children is to teach them early on to
build credit in their name. We have a lot of young people
now only use a debit card. They graduate from college,
they come back to Fargo, they get a beautiful job. They go down to rent
an apartment, they
fill out the lease, and the manager says
son, you have no credit. You don't even have a credit
file with the credit bureau. So you're gonna have to have
your parents co-sign the lease. So one of the best
things you can do is teach them to build credit. You know 30 years ago credit
was all about do I get the car, do I get the home. Everything today,
everything literally is based on your credit. So if you apply for a job,
they check your credit. You apply for auto insurance,
they check your credit. Life insurance, they
check your credit. Health insurance, they
check your credit. No matter what it is,
open a bank account, they check your credit. So everything is
based on your credit, and it's very important
to teach young people to build credit and
use that credit. And then finally I would
say freeze your credit. And if you don't want
to freeze your credit then use a credit
monitoring service, they're are like
$13, $15 a month, companies like Life
Lock, Privacy Guard, where they monitor
your credit for you and notify you in real time if someone's attempting
to use your name, social security
number, date of birth, or some of that
personal information so you can do
something about it. You have to be proactive,
you can't be reactive. This is not 30 years ago, you have to be a
smarter consumer today. You certainly have to be a
smarter businessman today. So you cannot rely
on the government, you cannot rely on the bank, you cannot rely on the
police to protect you. You have to learn
to protect yourself and take the steps
necessary to do that. - [Doug] Frank Abagnale,
thank you for joining us on Prairie Pulse. - Thanks Doug, my pleasure. (gentle music) - [Announcer]
Funding provided by the members of Prairie Public.
