The Art of the Steal

by Frank W. Abagnale

  Another big difference is, thirty-five years ago you had to be a con man with a con man’s idiosyncratic personality. You had to be facile. You had to be persuasive, with good improvisational skills, and you needed icy self-control. You were taking something and replicating it, not perfectly, and you had to make someone believe it was the real thing, make them believe it sufficiently that they would cash it. Today, criminals can make a traveler’s check or counterfeit bill that is so good that it doesn’t take any acting skills to walk up to a teller and pass it off as the real thing. Someone who truly looks like a crook can get away with it.

  Bear in mind, the person accepting counterfeit bills and forged checks these days is far less trained than in the past. Years ago, bank tellers were professional employees with months of training. Banks don’t want to pay benefits anymore, and so they don’t bother with full-time employees. They hire part-time help, and they don’t give them any more than the most superficial training. If a bank teller can’t tell the difference between a good hundred-dollar bill and a phony one, what hope is there for a hotel clerk or a sales clerk at the Gap?

  Wherever I go, I find that security is pretty dreadful. Four years ago, I went to the Las Vegas Airport United Airlines ticket counter and was asked to show my driver’s license in order to pick up my ticket. In my haste to catch my plane, the ticket clerk forgot to return the license. When I got back to the Midwest, where I live, I went to the Driver’s License Bureau, told them that I had lost my license, and they issued me a new one on the spot. A week later, an envelope arrived from United with my license. Now I had two. Since I travel a lot, I kept the old one in my briefcase so it would be handy to display at airports. Soon, the old license expired, but, as an experiment, I kept offering it for identification to see if anyone would notice that it was no longer valid. For four years—at airports, banks, and stores—hundreds of salespeople and clerks have looked at that license. Not one has noticed that it was invalid. I’ve decided that as soon as just one person says to me, “This is no good, the license has expired,” I’ll throw it away. But no one has. Is there any wonder we have this mad frenzy of fraud?

  KIDS TODAY

  What bothers me a lot is, it used to be just the hardened criminal you had to worry about. Today it could be anyone. I’m not being politically correct, but I’m convinced that the main reason we have so much fraud today is because we live in an extremely unethical society. There’s been a sharp slippage in ethics that has inspired a culture of fraud. And so what you’re up against today is people who you’d consider trustworthy who have no ethics.

  There are all these computer-savvy kids, many of whom are making twenty-dollar bills on their computers at home. They’re scanning them in and printing them on their ink jet printers and taking them to the convenience store or the school cafeteria and spending them. This happens all the time because they think it’s okay to do it.

  We live in a society that doesn’t teach ethics at home. We live in a society that doesn’t teach ethics in school, because teachers would be accused of teaching morality. We live in a society where you can’t even find a four-year college course on ethics, and if you could find one, they’d be talking about ethics three hundred years ago that have no relevance to ethics in the business world today.

  I don’t know anything that shows it better than Who’s Who Among American High School Students. For more than thirty years, the organization has gone out and selected sixteen thousand high school students to be honored each year in their publication. In order to be accepted, a student had to have maintained a 4.0 average through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade. Once accepted, a student has to fill out a form and answer five questions. I’ve always been interested in question No. 3, and I’ve followed the results for twenty years, because they’ve changed dramatically. The question asks, During the last three years of high school, did you steal, cheat, lie, copy, or plagiarize? In the latest survey, more than 80 percent of the students said that they did. Like it was okay.

  I believe we should be teaching ethics as early as maybe fifth grade, but we’re not doing it. Not long ago, I visited two major pharmaceutical companies. Abbott Laboratories and Glaxo Wellcome, and both of them told me that they had brought ethics training in house. They established their own ethical standards, and they require their employees to go through training. They’ve had to create their own code of conduct, because it’s not being done at home.

  When I talk to people about con artists, they always ask me, well, is there a certain type of person to beware of? It’s been my experience, on both sides of the law, that there is no profile of who’s a con artist or forger. I’ve seen men who were eighty years old and women in their teens commit the same types of fraud. There may be a profile for bombers or serial killers, but not for the confidence man. Most of the time, it’s the people you least expect who steal from you. Of all the calls I get from corporate managers lamenting that an employee stole from them, it’s never, “Well, I had this person and six months later I found out he was embezzling from me.” Instead, it’s always, “This man worked for me for twenty years. He was a saint. I trusted him like my brother. I can’t believe he stole from me.” It’s far more often the long-term employee than the newly-hired one who steals from you. In the world of the con, the unexpected becomes the expected.

  AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION

  As easy as these crimes are to commit, I firmly believe that most of them are easily prevented. Banks and companies simply have to learn to secure their systems as best they can. And you have to be a very smart consumer today.

  I travel all over the world talking about fraud, and one of the interesting things is that in Europe or Australia, even in Canada, the societies are very proactive. Americans are very reactive. A guy in Britain, for instance, will say, “This check? We could use this check, but then somebody might do this or might do that, so let’s fix it so he can’t do that.” In the U.S., the attitude is, “We’ll use this. If we have a problem, we’ll fix it.” They worry about it later on. In fact, 90 percent of those who hire me to design secure documents, they’ve only hired me because somebody counterfeited their documents. No company has ever called me in to design their check ahead of a problem. It’s always, “Somebody really got to us for a ton of money, and we don’t want that to happen again.”

  It’s much better to avoid becoming a victim than trying to figure out how to get your money back once you become a victim. Once you’re a victim, you won’t get your money back. Everyone has to start being proactive. You have to ask yourself every time you go on the Internet, which is probably every day, what information am I putting out there, and how could someone use that information? The crime of the future is identity theft, when some stranger acquires enough of the basic information about you that, when it comes to buying things on credit and making withdrawals from the bank, he in effect becomes you. It’s already the fastest-growing crime in America, as criminals assume other people’s identity in disturbing numbers. That’s what happened to Michelle Brown, whose ordeal I’ll return to in the final chapter.

  In the following chapters, I plan to take you into the world of the confidence man. I’m going to tell you about some of the most ingenious scams that I’ve encountered during my twenty-five years as a fraud specialist. I’ll tell you how to spot a bogus check and how to recognize a counterfeit bill. I’ll tell you why a piece of Scotch tape can make a check worth a lot more, and why you shouldn’t write your grocery list on a deposit slip. I’ll tell you about how a man made a considerable amount of money off supposedly broken windows, and why criminals iron credit cards. I’ll tell you about the mustard squirter and the rock in the box, about the Vickers Gang and their long-running refund scam, about how to earn $100,000 from a demolished car, and why a thief brings glue with him to the ATM. This is all for the purpose of teaching you how to avoid becoming a victim of fraud. For I strongly believe that punishment for fraud and recovery of stolen funds is so rare today that preventio
n is the only viable course of action.

  Above all, the thing to remember is that nothing is foolproof. Every form of payment has an inherent risk in it. Every system has a flaw. Every system has been designed by a man or woman, and that means a man or woman can defeat it. Sherlock Holmes said it best: “What one invents, one will discover.” And, you can be sure a man or woman will defeat it. I can only laugh when someone says to me that this electronic system is foolproof, you can’t beat it. That’s a ridiculous statement. Someone had to create it, so obviously someone can defeat it.

  I do recognize that by revealing how scams work, I run a risk. During my career, I have never conducted seminars open to the general public, but always under the sponsorship of an association, a company, or a financial institution. I hope, when you read this book, you see it as a useful educational tool for a business person or a consumer. I, with a criminal mind, know that some will see it as a bible and a great instructional book for the amateur forger. In order to educate the masses, though, I feel it’s worth taking that risk. Why should only the criminals know the tricks?

  Fraud goes on every day, in every city, all over the world. Practiced today by increasingly wily criminals, fraud is incredibly complex, and full of nuance and creativity. Businesses and consumers have never been more vulnerable. To more and more people, fraud is no longer an abstraction but an act with a face and a name. The most effective strategy to prevent it is to make things difficult and complicated enough to raise a murmur of distress from the crook. That way he’ll decide it’s not worth the effort to try and take advantage of you.

  A criminal always looks for the easiest path to riches. At my house, I have a security camera and security system, and after dark the place lights up like Yankee Stadium. A burglar takes one look at my house and heads to the next block. It’s the same thing with a forger or a con artist. He’ll search for the easy mark. So let’s learn how to keep it from being you.

  2

  [LOOKING FOR

  MR. GOODCHECK]

  A few years ago, a man double-parked his rental car in Miami and was given a parking ticket. He was from Argentina, visiting on vacation. He stuck the parking ticket in his briefcase and it went back with him to Argentina. While he was unpacking his luggage, he came across the ticket. The fine was twenty dollars. He searched around in his pockets and found that he still had some leftover U.S. currency. He stuffed a twenty-dollar bill and two singles in the envelope along with the ticket, sealed it, and mailed it to the Miami city clerk.

  When the city clerk opened the envelope, he noted that the man had overpaid by $2.00. Instead of sending him the $2.00 back, the city mailed him a check for $2.00. When the man opened the envelope and found the check, he thought it was too good to be true. He took that check, scanned it into his computer and changed the amount to what he deemed was a more appreciative refund—$1.45 million. He printed out the corrected check and deposited it in a bank in Argentina. The city of Miami dispenses many checks for more than $1 million, and so it was paid without question. Because we don’t have extradition rights with Argentina, the man got away with it. He became a millionaire from a twenty-dollar parking ticket.

  Since he was never caught, I can only speculate on the actual mindset of the Argentinian. But I happen to think the guy was doing this little caper as a lark, just to see if he could get away with it. Obviously, since he knew the mechanics of how to forge a check, he had to be at least a little bit crooked. But I sort of doubt that he ever imagined he could succeed at something so outrageous; he just couldn’t believe that forgery had become so easy.

  Oh, but it has.

  THE TRULY NOTEWORTHY NEWS

  Despite the fact that we read a lot of stories in the newspapers about someone downloading credit card numbers from a website, or manufacturing phony Visa cards in some warehouse in Queens, the truth is, check fraud is much more prevalent. And although the average value of a fraudulent check is less than one thousand dollars, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency estimates that total check fraud losses exceed $19 billion a year (and if we start giving out more parking tickets it might get a lot worse). Visa and MasterCard losses are less than 10 percent of that. And bank robbers, by contrast, got away with a relatively paltry $68 million in 1999.

  Payment by check is far and away the most popular form of payment in the United States, easily exceeding payments by cash and credit card combined. Americans wrote 69 billion checks in 1999, and every year they write a billion more. No one knows that better than criminals. That’s why worthless checks are one of the most serious white-collar crimes affecting businesses today. Every day, American banks, savings banks, and credit unions return 1.3 million worthless checks. That’s $27 million of bad checks, every single day.

  But only about 2 percent of bad check passers are arrested, and only about 62 percent of all bad checks are ever collected. And the conviction rate for bad check passers is lamentably low.

  A SLIPPERY SLOPE

  Things have changed so much since my days as a check forger. Years ago, when a forger came to a city, there was a great deal of preparation involved if he wanted to forge checks. First, he would have to rent an apartment to establish a physical address. He’d try to find a place he could rent by the month so he wouldn’t have to bother with a lease. Still, he’d have to pay the first month’s rent along with a security deposit.

  Then he’d go down to the County Bureau of Vital Statistics and search through the death records for the year of his birth. He’d find an infant who was born around when he was born and died shortly afterward. He’d copy the vital information off the infant’s death certificate—the mother’s name, the father’s name, and so forth. Armed with this information, he could apply for a birth certificate. After he got the certificate, he’d go down to the Motor Vehicles Department and get a driver’s license. Then he’d go to the bank and open an account. That was the risky part, because he had to identify himself to the teller to fill out a new account card and a signature card. Then he had to wait ten days for checks to be printed up. That gave the bank ten days to run a credit bureau report, ten days to check on where he said he was employed, and ten days to contact his previous bank to see how he maintained his account.

  None of this is necessary today. You just buy your checks through TV Guide, one of the Sunday magazines you find in newspapers, or over the telephone. Anybody can order anybody’s checks. We’ve made it so easy for people to steal from us. In fact, we’re the only country in the world that does make it so easy. In every other country, you have to pick up your checks at the bank. In Australia, for instance, if you want to reorder checks, you have to physically go to your bank branch and place the order. When the checks arrive, you have to return to the bank and get them. Only recently have a few banks in Australia begun to entertain the idea of mailing reordered checks to customers.

  This whole notion of ordering checks directly from vendors started in an entirely innocent fashion. About fifteen years ago, a woman in Colorado Springs, Colo., named Miriam Loo had a greeting card and gift company called Current, which she started in the basement of her home. She had the idea of selling novelty checks, personal checks with special designs on them. She began with dogs. There were so many dog-crazed people, she figured they’d get a kick out of putting their dog on their checks. Sure enough, orders flowed in for checks with Beagles and Cocker Spaniels. Then she expanded beyond dogs into sailboats, cars, birds, flowers, whatever you wanted. It was a nice little business.

  The DeLuxe Corporation in Minneapolis, the king of checks, found out about this and said, hey, she’s encroaching on our turf. DeLuxe went and bought her company and entered the personal check business. At first, DeLuxe sold only to banks. Then it began to sell directly to individuals by mail. Banks didn’t like the idea, but DeLuxe didn’t back off. The three other check companies said, well, we’d never do that. But one by one, they entered the business. Since the late 1980s, advertisements like this have appeared in newspapers
and in direct mail: “Get two hundred checks for just $3.95. Or get one hundred fifty duplicate checks for only $4.95.” There are more than 200 companies that sell checks through magazines and the Internet. And there are no controls over them. It’s all perfectly legal.

  People can get anyone’s check. All they have to do is see it. Criminals nowadays will drive around until they find a ritzy neighborhood with million-dollar homes. They’ll knock on a door. When someone answers, they’ll say, “Boy, you’ve got a lot of leaves lying on your lawn. What’d you got, an acre here? I’ll tell you what, my buddy and I will clean up your leaves, leave the place immaculate, and it’ll cost you just seventy-five dollars.” The guy thinks it’s a great deal, the crooks clean up the leaves, and the owner pays them with a check for seventy-five dollars. That’s all they came for: the check. Then they go to the Internet and order the checks of a guy from a million-dollar home, forge them, and start cashing them. Next time, the guy will rake his own leaves.

  Or forgers drive to a wealthy neighborhood and park in a grocery store parking lot. They wait until you pull in in your Porsche or your Jaguar and they follow you into the store. You buy groceries. You have to write your check on a little pad that’s sticking up on the counter. They’re right next to you, loading items onto the counter. They look over your shoulder—most of them are women—and they can memorize your check in eight seconds. All they have to do is glance over your shoulder. You haven’t gotten past writing the date, and they’ve memorized it. Everything on it. They go back and fill out an order coupon. Name and address you’d like on the check? They put your name and address on the check. Style of check? You’ve got flags on your check, so they order checks with flags. How many? Two hundred. Last question: if you’d like these checks sent to an address other than the printed address on the face of the check, so state here. They fill in a P.O. Box. Ten days later, they’ve got your checks.