Catch Me If You Can
Frank Abagnale has such an extraordinary life story that the famous director Steven Spielberg made a film about it. He is a former fraud who turned out to be an author, lecturer and consultant. Actually, he’s one of the world's most respected authorities on the subjects of forgery, embezzlement and secure documents today.
He was born on 27th April, 1948, in New York. He stated that he had had a stable childhood until his parents had decided to get a divorce. He wanted to stay with his father when his parents got a divorce. He ran away from home when he was 16 years old and it was his teenage years when he started to commit petty crimes. As time passed, the crimes that he committed became more serious like burglary.
He didn’t have a diploma for a well-paid job and enough money in his bank account. He changed his date of birth on his driver’s license to show himself as 10 years older and made a fake diploma to find a better-paid job, but even these changes weren’t enough. Therefore, he started writing bad checks (the amount of money in the bank isn’t enough to pay the amount written on the check). He realized that he had the chance to cash more bad checks by impressing the bank tellers with a prestigious job. That’s when he decided to pretend to be a pilot. He called Pan American Airlines and told them that he had lost his uniform and learned where he could get another uniform. He took the uniform with a fake pilot ID. He was so intelligent that he learned everything he could about flying. When the airline caught some of his lies, it was time for him to change his job. Over the years he bounced from job to job. Once he was a pilot, then he became a physician, another time he was a lawyer. He committed all of these crimes between the ages of 15-21.
He got caught when one of his former girlfriends saw him on a wanted poster and turned him in to authorities. He was sentenced to 12 years, but he stayed in prison for 5 years. He made a deal with government officials and started to work for the federal government.
In one of his interviews, he stated that he considered his past unethical and wasn’t proud of what he had done. He also added that he was proud of helping the government.