A real man loves his wife, and places his family as the most important thing in life. Nothing has brought me more peace and content in life than simply being a good husband and father.
Frank Abagnale
Technology breeds crime and we are constantly trying to develop technology to stay one step ahead of the person trying to use it negatively.
Airline pilots are men to be admired and respected. Men to be trusted. Men of means. And you don't expect an airline pilot to be a local resident. Or a check swindler.
There's no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.
The law sometimes sleeps; it never dies.
The police can't protect consumers. People need to be more aware and educated about identity theft. You need to be a little bit wiser, a little bit smarter and there's nothing wrong with being skeptical. We live in a time when if you make it easy for someone to steal from you, someone will.
Why do the Yankees always win? The other team can't stop looking at the pinstripes.
People say that life is short, but it isn't short. It's very long.
You have to think a little smarter, be proactive, not reactive.
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.
There is no technology today that cannot be defeated by social engineering.
I was a millionaire twice over and half again before I was twenty-one. I stole every nickel of it and blew the bulk of the bundle on fine threads, gourmet foods, luxurious lodgings, fantastic foxes, fine wheels, and other sensual goodies.
We all grow up. Hopefully, we get wiser. Age brings wisdom, and fatherhood changes one's life completely.
Criminals look at identity theft and say only 1 in 700 criminals gets convicted of it. And they look at check forgery and they know that for every 1,400 forgers arrested, only about 123 get convicted and about 26 go to jail. So the rewards are great, but the risks are very slim. So that's one of the reasons that make it very popular.
A real man loves and respects his wife and is not only a good father but a man that his kids want to call 'Daddy.'
We're coming down to an extremely unethical society. Very few colleges offer courses in ethics, and very few companies have a code of conduct or code of ethics.
Every case involving cybercrime that I've been involved in, I've never found a master criminal sitting somewhere in Russia or Hong Kong or Beijing. It always ends up that somebody at the company did something they weren't supposed to do. They read an email, went to a website they weren't supposed to.
Every form of payment has some risk associated with it.
I'm glad I'm a draw. People know that, not only am I the guy that did it, I spent 40 years on the other side.
The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it opens the door to many crimes, so you have to stay ahead of it.
We should be very concerned: if identity theft is so simple to do, what's to stop me from entering this country and assuming the identity of someone else for the sole purpose of living here illegally for terrorist reasons? That alone would be a concern.
If I had been brilliant or a genius, I wouldn't have needed to break the law just to survive.
I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.
You fight technology with technology, so you have to stay one step ahead of the criminal. It's very much a chess game - they make a move, you have to make a move.
It's amazing to me that we live in such a wonderful country where anyone can have a problem in life and get up, dust themselves off and start all over again.
What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.
I didn't like taking money from individuals.
When people write about me, they usually start off with the headline 'World's Greatest Con Man.'
I think I was so successful, not because I was brilliant, but because I was so young. I had no fear of consequences.
I went from 198 pounds to 109 while I was in prison in France, and I had to tie my clothes on with rope.
You have to be very limited in who you give your social security number to.
I wasn't a Pan Am pilot or any other kind of pilot.
You should know, whether you live in the U.S. or in the U.K., that your identity has already been stolen.
It is amazing the information we give away. We make it easier and easier for criminals.
In all the years I've taught at the FBI Academy, I've only seen crime get easier, faster, and harder to detect.
I never use debit cards. I only use credit cards. This way, if someone does get my account number... and charges $1 million, by federal law, my liability is zero.
You can sit in a room and create anything you want on a laptop. That's why the real con men are gone.
I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot; therefore, I must be a Pan Am pilot.
We really need to get control over Social Security numbers. My children's generation, they're past it. But their children should be able to have a number that is secure.
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.
I always knew I'd get caught sooner or later. And I knew I would end up going to prison.
I don't believe that a piece of paper will excuse my actions. In the end, only my actions will.
I kept a notebook, a surreptitious journal in which I jotted down phrases, technical data, miscellaneous information, names, dates, places, telephone numbers, thoughts, and a collection of other data I thought was necessary or might prove helpful.
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 speak at a lot of universities, and people are always worried about Facebook, and when I explain how to use it properly, they immediately go back and make those changes.
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.
Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living room at Christmas. My mother couldn't have been played more correctly.
You have to believe in what you do. Take something you truly believe in and go about it in an honest way.
Criminals know that if they stay under certain thresholds, nobody is going to come after them.
Had I been older - maybe 25 or 30 - I would have never tried half the things I did because I would have rationalized everything and never did it.
