Description
The charismatic forger immortalized in Catch Me If You Can exposes the astonishing tactics of today’s identity theft criminals and offers powerful strategies to thwart them based on his second career as an acclaimed fraud-fighting consultant.
When Frank Abagnale trains law enforcement officers around the country about identity theft, he asks officers for their names and addresses and nothing more. In a matter of hours he can obtain everything he would need to steal their lives: Social Security numbers, dates of birth, current salaries, checking account numbers, the names of everyone in their families, and more. This illustrates how easy it is for anyone from anywhere in the world to assume our identities and in a matter of hours devastate our lives in ways that can take years to recover from. Considering that a fresh victim is hit every four seconds, Stealing Your Life is the reference everyone needs by an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity theft schemes.
Consider these sobering facts:
• Six out of ten American companies and government agencies have already been hacked.
• An estimated 80 percent of birth certificate requests are fulfilled through the mail for people using only a name and a return address.
• Americans write 39 billion checks a year, and half of them never reconcile their bank statements.
• A Social Security number costs $49 on the black market. A driver’s license goes for $90. A birth certificate will set you back $79.
Abagnale offers dozens of concrete steps to transform anyone from an easy mark into a hard case that criminals are likely to bypass:
• Don’t allow your kids to use the computer on which you do online banking and store financial records (children are apt to download games and attachments that host damaging viruses or attract spyware).
• Beware of offers that appeal to greed or fear in exchange for personal data.
• Monitor your credit report regularly and know if anyone’s been “knocking on your door.”
• Read privacy statements carefully and choose to opt out of sharing information whenever possible.
Brimming with anecdotes of creative criminality that are as entertaining as they are enlightening, Stealing Your Life is the practical way to shield yourself from one of today’s most nefarious and common crimes.
About the Author
Born and raised in the Westchester County city of Bronxville, New York, Abagnale attended Iona Preparatory School, an all boys Catholic high school which is run by the Irish Christian Brothers. He was the third of four children (two brothers and one sister) born to a French mother, Paula Abagnale, and an American father, Frank William Abagnale, Sr.One of the early signs of his future as a fraudster came when, after purchasing a car, he persuaded his father to lend him his Mobil card. With this card, he would purchase large quantities of car parts, such as tires, batteries, engines and fuel. The purchases were on paper only, the goods were never taken from the shelves. In an agreement with the gas station attendant, he would then immediately return the items for cash for less than the price at which they were purchased, the remainder being pocketed by the attendant. Not realizing that the card was in his father's name, he tricked his dad out of $3400, doing this to pay for dates, before the local Mobil branch sought his father out for questioning and expecting payment. Upon being confronted, Abagnale confessed to his father that "it's the girls that make me crazy", but escaped punishment for the incident. Later, his mother placed him for four months in a special Catholic Charities school for juvenile offenders.In 1964, when he was 16, his parents divorced. The experience was so traumatic that he ran away during a court break. It was the last time he saw his father, though he renewed contact with his mother after seven years.Living alone in New York City after running away, he became known as the "Big Nale", later shortened to just "Big". He decided to exploit his mature appearance and alter his driver's license to make it appear that he was ten years older to get a job. However Abagnale, posing as a high school dropout in his mid-twenties, quickly learned the more education one has, the more one is paid. Desperate to survive, he soon began working as a confidence trickster to earn money.He has since become the founder of a secure-document corporation based in Washington DC. He lectures regularly worldwide and lives in the Midwest with his wife and three sons.
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