Frank Abagnale on the death of the con artist and the rise of cybercrime

Abagnale talks to WIRED about his past life as a conman, identity theft, the criminal opportunities made possible by the web and the efforts made by governments to fight cybercrime.

How would the technology available today have affected your ability to con people in your early years?

What I did was almost 50 years ago and it’s about 4,000 times easier today to con people than when I did it. To forge a cheque 50 years ago, you needed a Heidelberg printed press, you had to be a skilled printer, know how to do colour separations, negatives, type-setting… those presses were 90 feet long and 18 feet high. There was a lot of work involved in creating a cheque.

Today, you open a laptop. If you are going to forge a British Airways cheque, you go to their website, capture the corporate logo and put it in the top right corner. You then put a jet taking off in the background and make a really fancy four-colour cheque in 15 minutes on your computer. You then go down to an office supply store, buy security cheque paper and put it in your colour printer.

Fifty years ago, information was hard to come by. When you created a cheque you had no way of knowing where in reality British Airways’ bank was, who was authorised to sign their cheques and you didn’t know their account number. Today you can call any corporation in the world and tell them you are getting ready to wire them money and they will tell you the bank, the wiring number, the account number. You can then ask for a copy of the annual report and on page three are the signatures of the chairman of the board, the CEO and the treasurer. It’s all on white glossy paper with black ink – scanner ready art. You then just print it onto the cheque.

Technology breeds crime and we are constantly trying to develop technology to stay one step ahead of the person trying to use it negatively.

Can you give me some examples of how technology breeds crime?

If I’m in the airport in London and I take out my iPhone and take a picture of you walking through the airport, I can use PittPatt – an application that used to be used by the FBI but has been bought by Google – for facial recognition. If you are on Facebook [or you are identified by your image online somewhere else, for example a company website] I can find out who you are within seconds. If you happen to tell me where you were born, your date of birth and that kind of information then I’m 98 percent of the way to stealing your identity.