Quest Q and A Spring 2010 : Page 27
Frank Abagnale at COLLABORATE 10 Tuesday, April 20 4:30 pm Quest Meeting of the Members 5:30 pm Exhibitor Showcase – Quest Booth (book signing) Wednesday, April 21 8:00 am – 10:15 am Session 77910: The Art of the Steal (Quest Executive Track) Q: After you finished serving out your agreement with federal authorities (helping them in exchange for your release), what made you decide to keep working in fraud and security? At what point did you say, ‘I think I’ll turn this into a career’? A: Most of the work inside the government is FBI. My actual obligation ended 26 years ago. It was very interesting to me, and I worked with a great bunch of people who had a cause protecting our country from terrorism. By now, I’ve been with the FBI for 35 years – 90 percent of the work I do is for them. I sell no products; I sell no services. My only client is really the federal government, and the only thing outside that is my speaking engagements. Most of those are for banks, Fortune 500 companies, and the like, focused on things like check forgery and cybercrime. They bring me on tour and have me speak, and I do a two or three hour presentation on the things they should be concerned about. Then we do a Q&A session about what concerns them. Q: What changes have you seen in fraud detection and avoidance the last few decades? A: The major thing – it never ceases to amaze me how easy it is. What I did 40 years ago is a thousand times easier today. When I forged checks years ago, I needed a Heidelburg press. I had to build scaffolding to bring myself to the top. But I was just a teenager and young enough to do that – there were color separations, negatives, plates and chemicals to work with. Today, all you have to do is sit at a laptop and look for a corporation’s name on a building. You capture the logo, put on the left-hand corner of a check and screen an image in the background. ‘Step and repeat’ the lettering in the background, print it off a color printer with check paper you can buy at a local stationery story – and what you end up with is prettier than the actual check the company uses. We live in a ‘too much information’ world. If you would have walked up to the press and said to me, ‘These checks are beautiful – but how do you know where Pan Am banks?’ I wouldn’t have known. I would have just made up a name. 27
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