The Art of the Steal

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[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.”

What landed me in jail was my other bad habit, which was my enthusiasm for passing bad checks. The main reason I adopted those guises was to give me credibility when I cashed hot checks—and to satisfy my great taste for women. Hotel clerks and merchants didn’t question pilots and doctors too closely. Through my various hustles, I passed something like $2.5 million worth of checks, a blizzard of paper that I scattered in earnest throughout all fifty states and twenty-six countries, all before I was legally allowed to drink. I was proficient enough at cashing fraudulent checks that I earned the distinction of becoming one of the most hunted criminals by the FBI.

All bad things come to an end, of course, and I was finally caught by the French police after a stewardess recognized me from a wanted poster when I was doing some shopping. I was twenty-one. Convicted of forgery, I spent six months in a French prison, was extradited to Sweden, where I was again convicted of forgery, and served another six months in the prison in Malmo. Then I was turned over to the authorities in the United States.

That transition, however, got mildly delayed. After my plane landed in New York and was taxiing toward the gate, where the law awaited me, I escaped through the toilet onto the runway and took off. Within weeks, I got caught at the Montreal Airport, and was sent to the Federal Detention Center in Atlanta, to await trial. But I escaped by conning guards into thinking that I was a prison inspector. That kept me on the lam a bit longer. Actually, all of one month longer.

By now, a lot of cops had memorized my face, and I could never go anywhere without looking over my shoulder. The funny thing is that I never resorted to disguises. I didn’t dye my hair or grow a beard. The reason why I didn’t was because I was really sensitive to retaining my true identity. Regardless of the various aliases I adopted, I’d always be Frank Adams or Frank Williams or Frank something. I wanted to keep at least part of my real name intact. And because I didn’t take further precautions, I did realize that I was going to get caught, and probably sooner rather than later. Any criminal recognizes that the law sleeps, but it never dies.

Finally, one day I was walking past the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Two plainclothes detectives were standing on the street corner, munching on hot dogs. One of them stared quizzically at me and yelled, “Hey Frank.” I turned around, and they identified themselves as police officers and said that I was Frank Abagnale. I vigorously denied it, but they knew better and took me in. Within a couple of hours, I had been positively identified. The following day, I was put in the custody of the FBI.

THE END OF THE ROAD

It didn’t take long for the crush of state and federal complaints to pour in: forgery, passing worthless checks, swindling, mail fraud, counterfeiting, and on and on. Prosecutors and U.S. attorneys from around the country competed to be the one who would bring me to trial, as if I were some sort of lottery prize. They all had strong cases. There was a lengthy list of witnesses willing and able to identify me and testify against me.

An arbitrary decision was made to bring me to trial in Atlanta. There were plenty of cities where I was not likely to be honored by the Chamber of Commerce, but I had done a lot of damage in Atlanta. I had spent a year there pretending to be a doctor, and I doubted that I was remembered fondly. And, of course, there was that little incident of escaping from a federal prison. Needless to say, it wouldn’t have been my first choice as a trial site. I had a good lawyer, though, and he was able to broker a favorable deal. In April 1971, I appeared before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to all the crimes “known and unknown” that I had committed in the United States. There were hundreds of outstanding charges against me, but the judge collapsed them into eight counts. He sentenced me to ten years on each of seven counts of fraud, to run concurrently, and two years on the one count of escape, which were to be served consecutively. And he remanded me to prison in Virginia.

TWENTY CENTS AN HOUR

The Petersburg jail wasn’t the worst place to do time. It was a far cry from the French jail that had shattered my soul and nearly killed me. But it wasn’t a great place to be, either. The days merged into one continuous blur.

I kept to myself and did my work diligently. I was assigned as a clerk in this big tire factory that recapped tires for government vehicles. I earned all of twenty cents an hour, and I was definitely not allowed a checking account. On the weekends, they showed movies to the inmates, the same ones that they played in town. The prison used to pay the town projectionist to come in and run the projector. But then they decided to train an inmate to do it, and for some reason they chose me. You had to be licensed to do the job, and so I was trained and took a test and got a license. I was the only one who was taught how to run the projector, and even when I was sick, I had to drag myself out of my cell on the weekends and show the movies.

When we had idle time, we’d sit around and compare war stories. I was constantly bemused by the dumb acts that landed some of the other inmates in jail. There were these two teenagers from Long Island. They were smoking dope one night when they encountered this Jamaican guy who introduced himself only as “Mustard.” After hanging out with them, Mustard asked if they wanted to rob a bank. They had never stolen anything, but he made it sound like a rollicking adventure. The plans were a little ragged. Mustard waited for them a few blocks away from the bank. He gave them guns. They drove a car one of them had borrowed from his father and parked it right in front of the branch, where surveillance cameras were whirring. They wore no disguises. They entered, marched up to a teller, and collected five thousand dollars, all while the cameras taped them. They drove the two blocks to their rendezvous with Mustard. He took the five thousand dollars, let them keep the guns, and said he’d meet them that evening. After they drove a few more blocks, the cops had them surrounded. The police said they’d let them off if they gave up the mastermind. All they knew, they said, was his name was Mustard. And he had the money. In court, the judge said they were so stupid that he was giving them each five years.

Another guy from New York had never done anything wrong, either, but one day, badly in need of money, he decided to rob a bank. Almost randomly, he selected a branch on Lexington Avenue. He went up to a teller and made his demands. She said, “You better turn around.” Everyone behind him had a gun trained on him. The branch was beneath what was then the New York City headquarters of the FBI, and all the customers were agents cashing their paychecks.

When the others learned why I was there—for passing $2.5 million of bum checks—they were practically drooling. At least I was put away for being clever.

But I didn’t make any friends in prison. I felt no connection to the other inmates. No one I met felt like a defeated soul, a loser, but merely a winner waiting out a temporary setback. They were in a dangerous state of denial. Of all the inmates I met, none was remorseful about the crimes he had committed, and that genuinely bothered me. No one ever said to me, “Gee, I really screwed up my life. I’m going to set things straight.” It was very demoralizing to me that in all the time I was in prison, not one of the six hundred inmates ever said that he was going to change. Instead, everyone was planning the next scam. And they were all trying to learn from me. Among inmates, con men are always looked up to as the upper echelon of criminals. Fellow inmates were always pressing me for applicable tips on getting fake IDs and ways to counterfeit checks.

LETTING TIME SERVE ME

I wasn’t thinking that way anymore. I had crossed a crucial threshold. Crime no longer seemed romantic or noble, or in any way appealing to me. I had lived a life of incredible intensity. I knew I had made tragic mistakes and I wanted to make amends. So I’d refuse to offer them any advice that would merely perpetuate the treadmill they were on. I’d just brush them off by saying, “Do you just want to come back to the joint again? You know you’ll get caught.”

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t believe prison rehabilitated me, or in any way fostered my moral and spiritual reform. A bright light didn’t appear and God didn’t speak to me. I simply grew up. I was a teenager when I was forging checks. As I got older, my conscience began to bother me. When I went into a bank at sixteen and wrote a bad check, I’d think, they’ve got millions of dollars, they won’t miss a few hundred or a few thousand. A couple of years later, I would worry that the teller might lose her job. I started to look at things more rationally and as a more mature person. I had tired of a life where everyone you meet believes you to be someone you’re not. It’s pretty hard to have a serious relationship with a woman when you’re lying and using a phony name.

And so, with my changed outlook, I never sat around thinking of my next scam. I had no idea what I would do when I got out, but whether I ended up roping cattle or selling kitchen appliances, the one thing I was certain about was that I would never pull another scam.

There’s this whole thing about going to prison and serving time, or going to prison and have time serve you. I wanted time to serve me. I managed to get my GED, and I took some college courses to advance my limited education. Above all else, I dearly wanted to get out and rejoin society while I still had the time to construct a new life. I didn’t know what that new life could be, but I was itching to start it.

As a con man, though, I was always given a hard time. My father died, and like all inmates, I expected to be allowed a funeral visit home. But I was denied this routine privilege, because the Bureau of Prisons was afraid that I would escape and embarrass it. All these murderers and violent criminals were allowed funeral visits, but not me.

With my parole rejections, I began to believe that I was going to have to serve every last day of my sentence. I was disturbed and baffled, but in prison you have no rights. Finally, on my third try, after having served three years of my sentence, I was granted parole. When I was asked what city I would like to be paroled in, I said that I didn’t really care. I only asked that it not be New York. My mother and brothers were there, and I didn’t think that I could handle the family situation just yet. I also thought New York offered far too many enticements for someone just embarking on a legitimate life.

I ended up being paroled to Houston, Texas. My instructions were to report to a United States parole officer within seventy-two hours of my arrival. And I was told that it would very much behoove me to find a job within those three days.

WELCOME BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

The real world was beckoning again, but I couldn’t be sure I was ready for it. People who have never been in jail don’t understand what happens to a person. Even if you’re serving a short sentence, when you’re in prison, you become institutionalized. You get up in the morning, and breakfast has been prepared for you. They take care of your medical needs. Your clothes are cleaned and pressed for you. You get lunch. You get dinner. You become dependent. Then, all of a sudden, the government says, you’re free. You’re on the train to Houston. You have no money. You don’t know a soul. Even for an intelligent, resourceful person like myself, it was very difficult. Nobody likes an ex-con, and nobody likes an ex-con less than an employer, whether it’s a bank officer or a bowling alley manager.

Even those who were ostensibly there to help me weren’t that helpful. The supervisor at the parole office was both cold and defensive. He made it clear that, to him, any ex-con was repellent. “I don’t want you here, Abagnale,” he told me. “You were forced on me. I don’t like con men, and I want you to know that before we even start our relationship. I don’t think you’ll last a month before you’re headed back to the joint. Whatever, you had better understand this. Don’t make a wrong move with me. I want to see you every week, and when you get a job, I’ll be out to see you regularly. Mess up, and I’m sure you will, and I’ll personally escort you back to prison.”

I didn’t waste my time with talk. This guy was not going to be any help. I was on my own.

My first job was at a pizza parlor. I was a combination waiter, cook, and managerial trainee. I didn’t bother to tell my boss that I was an ex-convict, and I wasn’t asked. I was an early believer in don’t ask, don’t tell. The work was about as tedious as you might imagine. I liked eating pizza well enough, but I didn’t much care for serving it. On the side, to make ends meet, I drove a bus from the airport to downtown.

No matter how menial the job, I was a good worker. I was even entrusted with depositing the cash receipts at the pizza parlor, and every dollar got to the bank. But after about six months on the job, officials of the chain that operated the place took a closer look into my background in anticipation of naming me a manager of one of their shops. Discovering that I was a federal prison parolee, they fired me.

So I moved on. Within a week, I was hired as a stockboy in a supermarket, assigned to the night shift. Again, when applying for the job, I didn’t point out my dark past. The job wasn’t much, but one day I noticed a customer, a fetching young woman who was in graduate school. We started dating and we really clicked. I didn’t reveal my past for several months, and when I did, while we were sitting on a park bench, she at first found it difficult to accept. But she realized that I was just a naïve kid when I committed the crimes, and that I was a changed man.

Her parents had a harder time warming to the notion of their daughter’s ex-con suitor. She really worked on them, especially her father. She pleaded with him to go talk to my parole officer, for she knew he would tell him how I had changed. That pessimistic parole supervisor had assigned me to a highly supportive and unbiased parole officer who did all he could to elevate my spirits. He was a truly decent man, a born-again Christian with a generous humor who was always bringing up God in our discussions. We had a great relationship.

Finally, to appease her, my girlfriend’s father did call my parole officer. He gave me a good build-up. He said, “I don’t think Frank will ever go back to prison. He went down the wrong road, and he’s smart enough to know the right road now.” But then he had to insert a final thought: “I must tell you, though, I have five daughters, and I wouldn’t let one of them get within six miles of Frank.” That set me back months.

But finally they did accept me, and my girlfriend and I got married soon afterward.

After nine months in the supermarket, the district manager buttonholed me one day and said that they were opening a new store in the suburbs, which would be their first store to stay open twenty-four hours. He told me he wanted me to be the night manager. I was flattered. I liked that job, and I did it well. As always, I had made a point of being presentable and personable, and was dedicated to what I was doing. Then came the familiar story. A security check turned up my checkered past, and once again I was brusquely shown the door.

The truth is, I had felt extremely comfortable being a supermarket manager. I liked overseeing people and making the decisions that had to be made. There were enough complications to the work to intellectually challenge me and satisfy my ego. Had I not been fired, I honestly think that today I would still be running a supermarket, making decisions about canned peas and corn flakes.

The cycle continued for me. Nobody cared about my performance on the job, only my illicit past. Nobody was willing to believe that I was a different person. Once a con man, in their view, always a con man. It’s a terrible feeling to want to reconstruct your life, and yet find yourself blocked at every turn. This made for a lot of tension.

A hopelessness sank in. This was not the routine hopelessness of a bad day or a bad week, but a deep despair and a recognition that nothing could go right again. Even though I knew the dire consequences, I seriously began to think of reverting to my past criminal behavior. There seemed to be no other way to get anywhere. I was angry at the establishment for refusing to give me that second chance that I knew I would make good on.

In my latest incarnation, I was working at night as a movie projectionist—that projectionist’s license I acquired in prison had come in handy after all. In this case, I had told the manager about my past, and he didn’t really care. I was upstairs locked in this booth for eight hours; what harm could I do? The job paid pretty well, but it was hardly thought-provoking work. I thought to myself that I was smarter than this, that I was wasting genuine talents that I possessed. What had made me so good as a con artist was my photographic memory that enabled me to acquire the knowledge and pose as someone else in an astonishingly short span of time. I could focus on things with an extraordinary intensity. And I was extremely observant, always noticing the small things that others didn’t. These traits gave me an extra edge that I milked for all they were worth. But they didn’t go very far in the cramped milieu of a projectionist’s booth.

WHEN WRONGS CAN MAKE A RIGHT

Something had to change and change fast. Luckily, it did. One day my parole officer said to me, “You know so much about false documents and check kiting, have you ever given thought to going out and giving talks to law enforcement agencies about these things?”

“Well, no,” I said.

“Well, the government has approached me about this,” he said. “There would be no pay. And, of course, nobody could force you to do it.”

“How would it work?” I asked.

“You’d just talk to law enforcement agents about cons and counterfeit documents and how to recognize them,” he said. “Give them tips on how con artists work, so they could get better at catching them.”

“I guess I could do that,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

So I began to go around locally and talk in front of members of the sheriff’s office and the constable’s office. I’d lecture to local FBI agents and postal inspectors. I didn’t have any prepared remarks or slides or anything. I just told them what I did and how I did it, how I’d get false IDs and how I would open bank accounts and then withdraw money that wasn’t really there. The agents asked me questions, and I found that I never had to say that I didn’t know the answer.

The next thing I knew, the head of security for Target stores approached me and asked if I could come and talk to some of their store managers. I saw no reason not to, and so I did that, too. I got a warm and interested reception. They didn’t pay me, either.

I was still working as a projectionist but these gigs forced me to take a long hard look at myself and my prospects. I still had vision and a dreamer’s idealism. I was enjoying these little security presentations, and they ignited a new excitement in me. A plan slowly formed in my mind, one that I thought would allow me to use my expertise in a redemptive way and permit me to engage in a more satisfying life than the one I had in the projectionist’s booth. I went to my new parole officer and told him what I had in mind.

I said that, in doing these little talks, I realized that I had as much knowledge as any man alive concerning the mechanics of forgery, check swindling, counterfeiting, and other similar crimes. I’d now realized that if I directed this knowledge into the right channels, I could help people. For instance, every time I went to the store and wrote a check, I would see two or three mistakes made on the part of the clerk or cashier, mistakes that a flimflam artist would take advantage of. I had concluded that it was simply a lack of training.

I was always looking at systems and realizing how simple it was to beat them. For example, if I was going to mail a letter and I didn’t have a stamp, I knew I could take that letter and put the address of the person I was sending it to in the upper left-hand corner, and put my name in the middle of the envelope. The post office would then return it back to that person. So I would have sent it without a stamp. If I needed to get on a flight and it was fully booked, I knew that I could go to a phone, call the airline, and say, “Hi, do you have the manifest for flight 462? I’m Mr. Smith and I’m afraid I need to cancel my reservation.” There’s almost always a Smith or a Jones on just about any flight. Then I would call right back, ask if it were possible to get onto flight 462, and I’d be told, “Oh you’re in luck, we just had a cancellation.”

If I needed to make a long distance phone call and couldn’t pay for it, I knew a way to do it. You’d look around for the first available corporate building and get their main number. Say it was 999-2000. You’d dial 999-2020, figuring that it had to be someone’s extension. You get Bill Kenner in human resources. You’d say, “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong extension, could you put me back to the switchboard?” When the operator came on, you’d say, “This is Kenner in human resources, I need to make a long-distance call, could you give me an outside line?” And then you’d make your call.

It was obvious to me that every system had loopholes in it. I guess I thought in loopholes. And so I realized that I could teach people who handled checks and other legal documents how to protect themselves against fraud and theft. And I wanted to charge them.

“Well, if they’ll do it, go right ahead,” my parole officer said. “It’s up to you. But not the law enforcement people. That’s got to be free.”

I approached a suburban bank director and outlined what I had in mind. I was upfront in relating my sordid background as a chronic bilker of banks. I told him that I wanted to spend an hour one day after the bank closed to give a lecture to his employees. I told him that consumer fraud is committed today in the blink of an eye, and you needed to be prepared. If he felt the talk was worthless, I said, he didn’t owe me anything. If he found it beneficial, then he had to pay me five hundred dollars and make a few calls to colleagues at other banks and recommend that I come in and tutor their employees. I told him that if what I taught his people stopped just one bad check from crossing a teller’s window, then he would have more than made his five hundred dollars back. He told me to come on by.

The ways of the world are truly unpredictable. He liked my presentation, and I got both the pay and the referrals. This first paid appearance as a “white-collar crime specialist” led to another lecture at another bank, and another and another. Banks heard about me in Dallas. Then I got calls from El Paso. Before long, I was in demand not only by banks, but also by hotels, airlines, and other businesses. In retrospect, it was a godsend that I was paroled to Houston, because Houston was booming and that allowed me to get off to a very good start.

Twenty-five years have passed. I talk to all sorts of businesses today, and I’ve increased my fee. But to this day, I never take a dime from any law enforcement agency. I do a lot of lecturing to new agents at the FBI Academy, but I won’t accept any remuneration, not even my expenses. Part of it is, I’m just grateful to be where I am. And another part of it is that I feel this is one way I can make amends for my past.

ONCE A CON ARTIST . . .

And so I had turned things on their head. I had converted something negative into something positive. I had found a way to meld my expertise with social good. I still had all the needs that had made me a criminal. I had simply found a legal and socially acceptable way to fulfill those needs.

In a certain sense, I’m still a con artist. I’m just putting down a positive con these days, as opposed to the negative con I used in the past. I’ve merely redirected the talents I’ve always possessed. I’ve applied the same relentless attention to working on stopping fraud that I once applied to perpetuating fraud.

Living this way is much better than life the wrong way. I feel I’ve been handed a rare and precious gift. Clearly, I’m in a flourishing industry. For so many people, fraud has become the tactic of maximal gain. Fraud has grown so enormous throughout the world that it touches everyone. To be honest, it will never go away. If I lived to be four hundred years old, I’d still have a good job.

One of the nice things about my new life is that I’m making more money trying to prevent fraud than I ever did by committing fraud. Going straight does pay.

Estimates are that businesses lose an unprecedented $400 billion a year from fraud of one sort or another. I’m not talking about armed robbery, burglary, or narcotics, but fraud. It’s a staggering sum, equal to twice the budget of the U.S. military. If we were able to do away with fraud for just two years, we’d erase the national debt. We’d pay off Social Security for the next one hundred years.

Today bank tellers and salespeople are asked to accept so many different forms of payment, not just cash and checks but traveler’s checks, credit cards, debit cards, money orders, NOW accounts, and credit union share drafts. Each and every one of them is susceptible to fraud. And it’s not only embezzlement of money that’s a problem. It’s also embezzlement of information. Because information has become extremely valuable. And so far as restitution is concerned? Unheard of.

About a third of that $400 billion is from embezzlement, employees stealing from their employer. Out of embarrassment, the vast majority of companies never report these thefts to the police. They merely fire the employee, then tell human resources that if they receive a call about this person, say that they worked here but no longer work here. Consequently, the person goes on to steal from somebody else.

One of the things that always amuses me is that back when I was on the other side of the law, it was harder to commit fraud than it is now. You’d think it would be the opposite. And five years from now, it will be easier than it is today. And that’s because of one word—technology. Technology breeds crime and it always has. Thirty-five years ago, if I had to make a check, I literally had to print the check, and so I had to be a skilled printer. I had to know how to do color separations, make negatives, and make plates. It was very time-consuming and tedious. Today, sitting at home in an apartment with a PC, a scanner, a color printer, and a color copier, you can reproduce just about any type of document, including hard cash.

So when people ask me, if I were a con artist today, what would be different? I tell them, “Instead of making $2.5 million, I’d make $20 million. It’s that much easier.”

And we look on white-collar crime a lot differently. China, many years ago, printed a warning on its currency that whoever forged counterfeit money would be beheaded. Until the early 1800s, forgery in England qualified as a hanging offense. Justice got a bit more civilized, but thirty-five years ago you at least got sent to prison. Today, I’d probably get probation or community service, and maybe have to make some restitution. That’s not deterrence, that’s encouragement.

It’s a dark, morally ambiguous world today, but one problem we have in our society is that people don’t really care if some big company was embezzled for $100,000. They figure that’s the company’s problem; they’ve got billions. Instead, people want to know what law enforcement is doing to clear the streets of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and other violent criminals. People want them off the street, because they pose a physical threat. If you ask them about some guy selling counterfeit Gucci bags for twenty bucks down by the supermarket, their reaction is, “Well, I don’t care about that. If the purse looks good, I’ll buy one myself.” In addition to the cost of fraud, counterfeit goods are responsible for $350 billion in losses in the United States every year, but people don’t care about the problem because they think it doesn’t really affect them. What they don’t understand is that ultimately, it does affect them. It means we all pay higher fees for goods and services.

The police are frustrated. They complain that if they go out and arrest a check writer, then the district attorney doesn’t want to fool with the guy because it’s not a high profile case. The guy just wrote some bad checks. If they do prosecute him, the judge says the prison is full. He can’t put this check writer behind bars; he needs the cells for murderers and rapists, the really scary guys. Thus, something like 98 percent of forgers go free. Prosecutors have a benchmark. Rarely will they prosecute a fraud of less than five thousand dollars. So criminals know that if they stay under the benchmarks, they’re safe.

There’s no reason to rob a bank the old-fashioned way, with a mask, a gun, and a prayer. Why go and stick a gun in someone’s face? You’re talking about armed robbery, ten to twenty years. You could end up shooting someone. Someone could shoot you. And for what? The average bank robbery in 1998 and 1999 netted less than one thousand five hundred dollars. You’re a lot better off doing your robbing with the point of a pen. Why not walk in and cash a fraudulent check for twenty thousand dollars? Maybe you’d get six months in the county jail, if they caught you, if they prosecuted you, if they sent you to jail. And so the machinery of fraud functions almost untouched.

Another big difference is, thirty-five years ago you had to be a con man with a con man’s idiosyncratic personality. You had to be facile. You had to be persuasive, with good improvisational skills, and you needed icy self-control. You were taking something and replicating it, not perfectly, and you had to make someone believe it was the real thing, make them believe it sufficiently that they would cash it. Today, criminals can make a traveler’s check or counterfeit bill that is so good that it doesn’t take any acting skills to walk up to a teller and pass it off as the real thing. Someone who truly looks like a crook can get away with it.

Bear in mind, the person accepting counterfeit bills and forged checks these days is far less trained than in the past. Years ago, bank tellers were professional employees with months of training. Banks don’t want to pay benefits anymore, and so they don’t bother with full-time employees. They hire part-time help, and they don’t give them any more than the most superficial training. If a bank teller can’t tell the difference between a good hundred-dollar bill and a phony one, what hope is there for a hotel clerk or a sales clerk at the Gap?

Wherever I go, I find that security is pretty dreadful. Four years ago, I went to the Las Vegas Airport United Airlines ticket counter and was asked to show my driver’s license in order to pick up my ticket. In my haste to catch my plane, the ticket clerk forgot to return the license. When I got back to the Midwest, where I live, I went to the Driver’s License Bureau, told them that I had lost my license, and they issued me a new one on the spot. A week later, an envelope arrived from United with my license. Now I had two. Since I travel a lot, I kept the old one in my briefcase so it would be handy to display at airports. Soon, the old license expired, but, as an experiment, I kept offering it for identification to see if anyone would notice that it was no longer valid. For four years—at airports, banks, and stores—hundreds of salespeople and clerks have looked at that license. Not one has noticed that it was invalid. I’ve decided that as soon as just one person says to me, “This is no good, the license has expired,” I’ll throw it away. But no one has. Is there any wonder we have this mad frenzy of fraud?

KIDS TODAY

What bothers me a lot is, it used to be just the hardened criminal you had to worry about. Today it could be anyone. I’m not being politically correct, but I’m convinced that the main reason we have so much fraud today is because we live in an extremely unethical society. There’s been a sharp slippage in ethics that has inspired a culture of fraud. And so what you’re up against today is people who you’d consider trustworthy who have no ethics.

There are all these computer-savvy kids, many of whom are making twenty-dollar bills on their computers at home. They’re scanning them in and printing them on their ink jet printers and taking them to the convenience store or the school cafeteria and spending them. This happens all the time because they think it’s okay to do it.

We live in a society that doesn’t teach ethics at home. We live in a society that doesn’t teach ethics in school, because teachers would be accused of teaching morality. We live in a society where you can’t even find a four-year college course on ethics, and if you could find one, they’d be talking about ethics three hundred years ago that have no relevance to ethics in the business world today.

I don’t know anything that shows it better than Who’s Who Among American High School Students. For more than thirty years, the organization has gone out and selected sixteen thousand high school students to be honored each year in their publication. In order to be accepted, a student had to have maintained a 4.0 average through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade. Once accepted, a student has to fill out a form and answer five questions. I’ve always been interested in question No. 3, and I’ve followed the results for twenty years, because they’ve changed dramatically. The question asks, During the last three years of high school, did you steal, cheat, lie, copy, or plagiarize? In the latest survey, more than 80 percent of the students said that they did. Like it was okay.

I believe we should be teaching ethics as early as maybe fifth grade, but we’re not doing it. Not long ago, I visited two major pharmaceutical companies. Abbott Laboratories and Glaxo Wellcome, and both of them told me that they had brought ethics training in house. They established their own ethical standards, and they require their employees to go through training. They’ve had to create their own code of conduct, because it’s not being done at home.

When I talk to people about con artists, they always ask me, well, is there a certain type of person to beware of? It’s been my experience, on both sides of the law, that there is no profile of who’s a con artist or forger. I’ve seen men who were eighty years old and women in their teens commit the same types of fraud. There may be a profile for bombers or serial killers, but not for the confidence man. Most of the time, it’s the people you least expect who steal from you. Of all the calls I get from corporate managers lamenting that an employee stole from them, it’s never, “Well, I had this person and six months later I found out he was embezzling from me.” Instead, it’s always, “This man worked for me for twenty years. He was a saint. I trusted him like my brother. I can’t believe he stole from me.” It’s far more often the long-term employee than the newly-hired one who steals from you. In the world of the con, the unexpected becomes the expected.

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION

As easy as these crimes are to commit, I firmly believe that most of them are easily prevented. Banks and companies simply have to learn to secure their systems as best they can. And you have to be a very smart consumer today.

I travel all over the world talking about fraud, and one of the interesting things is that in Europe or Australia, even in Canada, the societies are very proactive. Americans are very reactive. A guy in Britain, for instance, will say, “This check? We could use this check, but then somebody might do this or might do that, so let’s fix it so he can’t do that.” In the U.S., the attitude is, “We’ll use this. If we have a problem, we’ll fix it.” They worry about it later on. In fact, 90 percent of those who hire me to design secure documents, they’ve only hired me because somebody counterfeited their documents. No company has ever called me in to design their check ahead of a problem. It’s always, “Somebody really got to us for a ton of money, and we don’t want that to happen again.”

It’s much better to avoid becoming a victim than trying to figure out how to get your money back once you become a victim. Once you’re a victim, you won’t get your money back. Everyone has to start being proactive. You have to ask yourself every time you go on the Internet, which is probably every day, what information am I putting out there, and how could someone use that information? The crime of the future is identity theft, when some stranger acquires enough of the basic information about you that, when it comes to buying things on credit and making withdrawals from the bank, he in effect becomes you. It’s already the fastest-growing crime in America, as criminals assume other people’s identity in disturbing numbers. That’s what happened to Michelle Brown, whose ordeal I’ll return to in the final chapter.

In the following chapters, I plan to take you into the world of the confidence man. I’m going to tell you about some of the most ingenious scams that I’ve encountered during my twenty-five years as a fraud specialist. I’ll tell you how to spot a bogus check and how to recognize a counterfeit bill. I’ll tell you why a piece of Scotch tape can make a check worth a lot more, and why you shouldn’t write your grocery list on a deposit slip. I’ll tell you about how a man made a considerable amount of money off supposedly broken windows, and why criminals iron credit cards. I’ll tell you about the mustard squirter and the rock in the box, about the Vickers Gang and their long-running refund scam, about how to earn $100,000 from a demolished car, and why a thief brings glue with him to the ATM. This is all for the purpose of teaching you how to avoid becoming a victim of fraud. For I strongly believe that punishment for fraud and recovery of stolen funds is so rare today that prevention is the only viable course of action.

Above all, the thing to remember is that nothing is foolproof. Every form of payment has an inherent risk in it. Every system has a flaw. Every system has been designed by a man or woman, and that means a man or woman can defeat it. Sherlock Holmes said it best: “What one invents, one will discover.” And, you can be sure a man or woman will defeat it. I can only laugh when someone says to me that this electronic system is foolproof, you can’t beat it. That’s a ridiculous statement. Someone had to create it, so obviously someone can defeat it.

I do recognize that by revealing how scams work, I run a risk. During my career, I have never conducted seminars open to the general public, but always under the sponsorship of an association, a company, or a financial institution. I hope, when you read this book, you see it as a useful educational tool for a business person or a consumer. I, with a criminal mind, know that some will see it as a bible and a great instructional book for the amateur forger. In order to educate the masses, though, I feel it’s worth taking that risk. Why should only the criminals know the tricks?

Fraud goes on every day, in every city, all over the world. Practiced today by increasingly wily criminals, fraud is incredibly complex, and full of nuance and creativity. Businesses and consumers have never been more vulnerable. To more and more people, fraud is no longer an abstraction but an act with a face and a name. The most effective strategy to prevent it is to make things difficult and complicated enough to raise a murmur of distress from the crook. That way he’ll decide it’s not worth the effort to try and take advantage of you.

A criminal always looks for the easiest path to riches. At my house, I have a security camera and security system, and after dark the place lights up like Yankee Stadium. A burglar takes one look at my house and heads to the next block. It’s the same thing with a forger or a con artist. He’ll search for the easy mark. So let’s learn how to keep it from being you.