Frank Abagnale - The Art of the Steal

THE Art

OF THE Steal

How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud—America’s #1 Crime

Frank W. Abagnale

BROADWAY BOOKS

NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

What Did She Want?

Chapter One

Putting Down a Positive Con

Chapter Two

Looking for Mr. Goodcheck

Chapter Three

Counterfeit Capers

Chapter Four

The Thief at the Next Desk

Chapter FIVE

The Rock in the Box and the Mustard Squirter

Chapter SIX

Card Games

Chapter SEVEN

Beating the Machine

Chapter EIGHT

The Cyberthief

Chapter NINE

When the Label Lies

Chapter TEN

Empty Promises

Chapter ELEVEN

Stealing Your Soul

Appendix

Fraud Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Frank W. Abagnale

Copyright

To my wife, Kelly,

and my three sons,

Scott, Chris, and Sean

PROLOGUE

[WHAT DID SHE WANT?]

It began on a winter day with a seemingly ordinary message on an answering machine. It was from someone at the bank. Something about her new Dodge Ram pickup and the payment past due on the loan. Michelle Brown figured it was one more of those misdirected calls. Not only didn’t she own a pickup, but anyone who knew her realized that there was no way she’d ever own a pickup. She had a penchant for sports cars, and she actually detested Dodges. Because her name was a common one, it was normal for her to get messages for some other Brown. In the past, she’d received calls for Mike Brown, a message looking for a Brown to pick up relatives from Hawaii who were waiting impatiently at the airport, and a call from some Uncle Brown about her horse she didn’t have.

Michelle Brown was a single woman in her late twenties. She lived in southern California and worked as a credit analyst. She was cheerful and luminous, and people found her fun to be around. Friends were always telling her how she was too nice. She worked hard and was tidy with her finances. She owned fifteen credit cards, but had never been late on a single payment. Ever since she was seventeen, she had had perfect credit. It was a thing with her. She liked everything in her life to be perfect.

She returned the call. She told the bank officer that there must be a mistake; she hadn’t bought a truck. The officer quickly agreed that he must have the wrong Michelle Brown. The phone numbers on the credit application weren’t working, and he had gotten this number from directory assistance in the hope that it was the right person. And the application did have her address on it. To prove beyond a doubt that it was another Michelle Brown he was searching for, she told him her Social Security number. She was stunned—it was the same one that was on the application.

Alarmed, she called up the credit reporting agencies and told them that something fishy was going on. They put a fraud alert on her credit and promised to send out a report on her recent purchases. She checked with the Division of Motor Vehicles, and learned something astonishing: a duplicate driver’s license had recently been issued to a Michelle Brown. Someone else was using her name, her address, her Social Security number, and her driver’s license. It was as if someone was slowly erasing her identity.

When her credit report arrived, there were delinquent bills on it for thousands of dollars, including a sizable phone bill and even a bill for liposuction treatments. What was this? She’d heard about people who got crosswise with creditors, but never her. She became afraid to open her own mailbox, for fear of what new debt would be awaiting her. In time, she would learn that there was an arrest warrant out for Michelle Brown in Texas. The charge was conspiracy to sell marijuana. She had never broken a law, any law. How could she be wanted?

Someone had appropriated her identity, but who and how? She felt chained to some stranger without a face, but with her name. How dare someone steal her name! She thought chillingly about the movie The Net, in which the actress Sandra Bullock plays a computer software tester whose identity gets erased by criminals.

Her whole life was thrust into darkness. She had just started a new job, but found herself unable to concentrate on her work. She had no appetite for food. She slept fitfully, if at all. Her bright personality darkened; friends didn’t recognize her. Her relationship with her boyfriend, a professional volleyball player, became strained and finally ended. He didn’t understand the depth of her distress. She spent a lot of time crying.

She began to worry that the other Michelle Brown might break into her apartment in search of her passport or her checks, or who knew what else. Whenever she got home after dark, she carried a flashlight and meticulously searched through the rooms, including every closet. She was weary and angry. When she went to bed at night, she felt haunted and scared. If she heard the slightest noise, her first instinct was that the woman calling herself Michelle Brown was out there lurking in the dark, right beneath her window. She shook with fear. Who was this person who was stealing her identity? Why, of all the people in the world, did she pick her? And what did she want?

1

[PUTTING DOWN

A POSITIVE CON]

There’s this thing they always say about con men: they live a chameleon existence. That was certainly true for me. I’d find myself in an unfamiliar situation and I’d quickly adapt. And that’s just what I did when they sent me to prison. I adapted to the role of prisoner, and I lived a life dictated by my imagination. In so many ways, the role felt small and unreal, when in fact it was the only real role I had lived in a long time.

Being cooped up in a confined space didn’t suit me, so I sort of half-lived, numbed to my existence, waiting patiently for a second chance. My battle plan was to always be on my best behavior, in the hope that this would enable me to get out early. The problem was, the better I behaved, the more convinced the prison officials were that I was up to no good. Twice I came up for parole and was refused. One of the members of the review committee actually said to me, “I see that your record is perfect, and that’s a problem. That tells me you’re still conning the prison and getting away with it.” In other words, if I had gotten into some fist fights or mauled a guard, then I might have gotten parole.

Everything I did right was always assumed to have an ulterior motive. That’s what happens when you have a reputation, and the reputation is that of a master con man.

I had been imprisoned for six months in France and another six months in Sweden, and now I was in my third year of a twelve-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia. But I wasn’t one of those inmates constantly prattling about his innocence. There was no doubt that I deserved to be behind bars.

LIVING LARGE

For five immature years, I had lived a life of illusion and tricks. I had enjoyed a misguided and regrettable run as one of the most successful con artists the world has ever known. A lengthy list of exploits had added to my iconography, all of them income-producing. I had masqueraded as a Pan Am airline pilot (don’t worry, I never actually took the controls), a pediatrician (I let my interns do the medical work), an assistant district attorney (I passed the bar while skipping the law school part), a sociology professor, and a stockbroker, all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. I had never gone beyond the tenth grade, but I had a limitless talent for fantasy and I lived a million lives in those five years. Before the authorities discovered my true identity, I was known throughout the world as “The Skywayman.” The New York Times, in its coverage, referred to me as “The Great Impostor.”