He is the prototype character of the fraud master in the famous movie "Cat and Mouse Game".
He "debuted" at the age of 16. Before the age of 21, he forged checks of 2.5 million US dollars and defrauded 26 countries. He was fooled around FBI. He even published an autobiography called " Catch Me If You Can ". He is quite arrogant.
He is also the youngest wanted criminal in the history of the FBI. He has pretended to be a airplane pilot , a pediatrician, etc., and used various means to defraud millions of dollars. In the end, he was arrested for being greeted.
He is Frank Abagnale, known as "the most powerful fraud artist of the 20th century". After
was released from prison, this Frank was recruited by the government and became an FBI researcher and consultant and lecturer in field offices. With his assistance, many cases were solved.
So, why did Frank become a liar? What did he do in the first half of his life? How to devote the rest of your life to the FBI?
How to become a "scam artist"
On April 27, 1948, Frank Abagnale was born in New York, USA. He has been very smart since he was a child and has an extraordinary memory.
When he was a child, Frank's family relied on a stationery store to make a living. The family environment was not very good, and his father often drank too much and quarreled with his mother.
Influenced by his family, even the talented Frank gradually became uneducated.
One day, Frank used his father's gas credit card and a truck to buy tires, batteries and some car-related items at a gas station, a mess.
Half an hour later, Frank returned to the store to return all the things, withdraw the cash from the card, and spent all the money. It was not until he was fined by the bank overdue that the matter was exposed. He was really a "filial son."
By 1965, Frank's mother could no longer stand her alcoholic father and finally chose to divorce. That year, Frank was 16 years old, and his life reached a turning point.
The sudden breakdown of his family left Frank at a loss. He later chose to run away from home and lived on the streets as a street kid.
After a few months, Frank felt that this kind of life was too boring. The other gangsters were too far behind him.
In Frank's eyes, the gangsters were too stupid, with well-developed limbs and simple minds. They would fight and kill if they disagreed with each other. They were low-level and dangerous. Being mixed up with this group of cows, horses, monkeys and sheep has seriously lowered my level.
So Frank left decisively, he wanted to find a serious career.
But Frank has no diploma and no experience. As expected, he can't find a serious job that pays quickly. It was impossible to work as a coolie, and he didn't know how to do business, so he simply found a less tiring job first - bank security guard.
It’s true that I’m not tired. I see a lot of money every day, but none of it is my own.
Frank suddenly thought about it and discovered a loophole. He accidentally saw that many car rental companies would put the money they earned in a day into the bank's fixed drop box.
So, he quietly posted a notice on the drop box: service suspended, please hand over the deposit to the security personnel on duty.
And this security guard is Frank.
He originally just wanted to try it, but he didn't expect that his first attempt was a huge success. The customer delivered a lot of money to him personally. Frank was beaming and thinking it was funny: How could a drop box be out of service?
Because the bank has a large flow of people every day, no one suspected Frank at first. When the bank reacted, Frank had already absconded with the money.
There were not so many identification and surveillance systems back then, so this kind of case was extremely difficult to solve, and Frank was able to get away with it.
From then on, he became out of control. What happened for the first time would lead to countless others in the future, and he went further and further down the road of deception.
2. The criminal path of a fraud genius
Soon after, Frank began to explore some more high-tech frauds, such as credit fraud, where he used his own checks to make excessive cash withdrawals at the bank where his account was located.
Frank knew that sooner or later he would be discovered by the bank, so he opened multiple accounts in multiple banks in advance and even forged new identities to cover up.
can indeed successfully defraud cash by doing this, but the efficiency is too low. Therefore, Frank thought of another way, forging fake checks.
50 years ago, to forge a check, you only needed to get a Heidelberg printing press with a press that was 90 feet long and 18 feet high, and asked professional printers how to separate colors, negatives, and typesetting. The process only takes two months. A well-known method of
is to print the account number on one's own deposit slip onto someone else's blank deposit slip.
Under this operation, the money deposited by other depositors did not reach the designated account, but was transferred to Frank's account, and he could make money even while lying down.
Most people would have stopped at this time. But Frank's ambition was too great. After he got the money, he squandered it everywhere, eating, drinking and traveling. Soon, he ran out of money, so he could only continue to rely on fraud to maintain this luxurious life.
After each stolen money was obtained, Frank changed his hairstyle and accent and moved from one city to another.
Once, he saw a pilot surrounded by a group of stewardesses, talking and laughing, and was very popular.
Frank thought to himself that he was beginning to look like a human being. Since checks could be forged, why not take advantage of the situation and forge a more respectable identity? After all, you can still fly for free by pretending to be a pilot.
Soon, Frank selected Pan Am Airways as his target.
But to be a pilot, you first need an employee card. He pretended to be a buyer for Pan American , and in the name of purchasing employee cards, he went to a printing shop that had cooperated with airlines and asked the other party to show him samples from various companies.
According to the plan, Frank selected the Pan American Airways model and expressed his intention to customize a large number of them based on this template. He also asked his boss to print his personal information and photos, saying that he would take a sample back to the company to see.
The boss naturally would not let go of this big deal. In order to please Pan American Airways, he processed it quickly that day. In this way, Frank got an employee card.
After receiving the employee card, Frank went to the Pan Am souvenir shop and bought an airplane model. He took off the logo stuck on the wing and pasted it on the employee card. It looked like there was no problem at all.
At the same time, he even forged a pilot license issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Immediately afterwards, Frank needed a pilot uniform, so he called the airline and claimed that he was a pilot, but the uniform was lost.
On the other side of the phone, the company gave him an address, and Frank ran there and successfully received a new uniform with fake documents.
In order to make himself look more like a pilot, Frank also pretended to be a student representative of aviation university and conducted in-depth interviews with relevant personnel of pan american airlines , which allowed frank to thoroughly understand the profession of pilot.
From then on, except that he couldn't fly a plane, Frank's behavior and conversation were no different from those of a real pilot. Even he himself vaguely felt that he was a pilot.
This year, he was 16 years old.
Soon, Frank used his excellent acting skills to deceive the internal staff who were negligent in reviewing and got the position of co-pilot.
Later, according to statistics from Pan American Airways, Frank used a forged employee identity to enjoy at least 250 free flights between the ages of 16 and 18, with a total range of 1.6 million kilometers, flying to 26 countries. During the
period, Frank's food, drinks, accommodation and transportation were reimbursed by the airline, and he even hired a stewardess.After landing, Frank was not idle. He disguised himself and went to the local bank to defraud, forging fake checks to cash out.
After all, no one would have thought that the criminal turned out to be an airline co-pilot. So every time the local police were still investigating, Frank would take the first flight and sneak away.
3. Unqualified doctors, self-taught lawyers
However, the road to deception is not always smooth, especially for such a high-tech job as a co-pilot.
Sometimes, the flight distance is too long, and the captain needs to let the co-pilot control the plane because he needs to take a short rest during the flight. But Frank can’t fly a plane, so what should he do?
Once, he took over the control stick of an airplane at an altitude of 30,000 feet. He was so frightened that he broke into a cold sweat and quietly activated the autopilot function. More than 140 lives are in his hands, this is no joke.
This incident left Frank with a psychological shadow, and his identity was almost revealed later on a flight to New Orleans .
Out of fear, Frank stopped pretending to be a co-pilot.
Soon after, he fled to Atlanta in Georgia and used similar tricks to transform himself into a pediatric hospital physician and supervisor.
's position did not require him to actually perform any medical procedures, and he could manage to use humor to mask his lack of medical knowledge.
Until one day during the night shift, a baby almost suffocated to death due to Frank's negligence.
That night, the nurse told Frank that this was a "blue baby." This is a term used for babies who are born with a condition that causes them to suffer from a lack of oxygen in their tissues.
Frank realized that posing as a doctor was as risky as a pilot and could seriously endanger his life, so he quit his job again.
From then on, Frank decided to do work that was not related to life.
Frank's third career was as a lawyer in Louisiana. He repeated his old tricks, first forging a law degree from Harvard University, and then through his own efforts, he took three law exams in six months and finally obtained a lawyer's license.
He dropped out of high school and never entered a university campus, but he actually became a truly qualified lawyer.
Naturally, no one would have thought that the man who would talk about the rule of law in court was actually a 19-year-old wanted criminal in the world.
One day, Frank met another lawyer who actually graduated from Harvard . He was afraid that his identity would be exposed, so he fled again.
This time, he went to Utah , where he faked a degree from Columbia University and became a teaching assistant, teaching sociology for a semester.
At the same time, most of Europe is looking for Frank, and there is currently nothing to do. The US police's pursuit of Frank is also tightening step by step.
So Frank decided to go to France to avoid the limelight.
In the movie "Cat and Mouse", Frank's ex-girlfriend, a flight attendant in France, recognized him and immediately called the police, and Frank was arrested.
In reality, Frank wanted to go to France but failed. He was arrested and stayed in New York that day.
As for the reason why he was caught, it was because when he went out to eat, an FBI agent investigating the case happened to be present. Seeing that he looked a bit like Franke on the wanted poster, he deliberately called out his name: "Hey! Frank!"
Frank turned around subconsciously, and then he was caught. That year, Frank was only 21 years old.
At that time, many countries around the world asked to extradite Frank, because he had deceived almost all of Europe. After his arrest, 12 countries requested his extradition and wanted him to serve jail time.
In the end, Frank served 5 years in prison and was only 26 years old when he was released. He could be described as "young and promising", but he was not used on the right path.
During the labor camp, Frank also helped the American police solve many cases in his spare time.
With Frank's criminal record so bad, it's impossible to find a job. And just when he was about to return to his old business, the FBI came to his door.
They gave Frank a chance to make a new start - he was recruited, and they arranged for him to work as a consultant and asked him to identify some true and false evidence.
At that time, checks and documents from major banks required manual verification of authenticity.
So Frank used his years of experience and his status as an FBI recruit to find a job identifying bills in a bank to make his reputation bigger and stronger. After
gained a certain amount of experience, Frank established an anti-corruption and fraud consulting company to serve the FBI and major financial companies.
In the first half of his life, he was imprisoned for fraud, but in the second half of his life, he made a lot of money by fighting fraud. Frank can be said to be a winner in life, both good and evil.
text / Gawazi
Reference: A brief analysis of Frank's character image and significance in "Cat and Mouse Game", Yan Ranran
