Frank Abagnale

I was very blessed it was Steven Spielberg who made the movie. He was very much into the redemption side of the story. They asked him in an interview why he had owned the rights to this story for 20 years before he made the movie, and he said, 'I wanted to see what the real Frank Abagnale did with his life before I immortalised him on film.'

One thing I've found is that if you educate and show people the risk, they will do something about it.

My father was never really the con-man type that the film shows him to be: he was straight as an arrow, though he did have problems with the IRS.

A lot of people say I was brilliant. I wasn't. I was an opportunist: a young entrepreneur who saw things and took advantage.

I went to the library and learned how checks work. I found out that routing numbers are like zip codes: the checks are sent to the bank that correlates to the routing number. If I manipulate those numbers to a bank far away, it would take longer to get back to the bank, which gave me more time to write more bad checks.

It's about taking the time to research and think things out. Honest people and criminals do the same thing; just the direction, good or bad, is different.

You should know, whether you live in the U.S. or in the U.K., that your identity has already been stolen.

If you look at any successful professional - a salesperson, a marketer, a real estate agent, a trader - they all have the same qualities as the con man. The only difference is that one side uses their talents in the right direction and the con man is taking the easy way out.

The biggest thing that concerns me is when we start getting countries using cybercrime to shut down infrastructure, electricity, communications systems, the Internet, et cetera.

I didn't like taking money from individuals.

There's no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.

I taught at the FBI for four decades - how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

I have never witnessed, nor will I live long enough to witness, a more simplistic crime than me stealing your identity.

When I look back at my life now, I'm not amazed by what I did at 16 to 21.

Banks are so protected from liability they would have to really do something that was their mistake in order for them to be liable for it. Banks don't look at signatures. They're processing millions of checks and they have very little liability.

If I check into a hotel, a lot of times, they know who I am.

In all the years I've taught at the FBI Academy, I've only seen crime get easier, faster, and harder to detect.

I don't use a debit card. The safest thing is a credit card because you're using the bank's money. If someone accesses your information, they are stealing the bank's money, not yours.

I spent five years of my youth in prison - some very bad prisons.

When 'Catch Me If You Can' was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What's amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print.