"My father was never really the con-man type that the film shows him to be: he was straight as an arr..." — 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.

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.