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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Frank Abagnale Quotes

There’s no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.

– Frank Abagnale

I don’t use a debit card. The safest thing is a credit card because you’re using the bank’s money. If someone accesses your information, they are stealing the bank’s money, not yours.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

There is no technology today that cannot be defeated by social engineering.

– Frank Abagnale

I think I was so successful, not because I was brilliant, but because I was so young. I had no fear of consequences.

– Frank Abagnale

I taught at the FBI for four decades – how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

I didn’t like taking money from individuals.

– Frank Abagnale

People care about others in their immediate network.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

I use a shredder for bank statements and phone bills. Most people use ribbon shredders that cut things straight: we can put those back together in an hour. Look for a security microcut shredder, which cuts papers into confetti.

– Frank Abagnale

I partied in every capital in Europe, basked on all the famous beaches, and good-timed it in South America, the South Seas, the Orient, and the more palatable portions of Africa.

– Frank Abagnale

When ‘Catch Me If You Can’ was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What’s amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print.

– Frank Abagnale

What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.

– Frank Abagnale

I served my time and came out of prison when I was just 26 and have worked with the government for 37 years. But people only remember me for what I did before that.

– Frank Abagnale

Almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there’s a touch of class involved.

– Frank Abagnale

The biggest thing that concerns me is when we start getting countries using cybercrime to shut down infrastructure, electricity, communications systems, the Internet, et cetera.

– Frank Abagnale

I have to be honest with you: When the FBI let me out of prison early to advise the agency on preventing fraud, I wasn’t a changed person. I wasn’t rehabilitated. But when I started working with the FBI, one of the most ethical groups of men and women in the world, I couldn’t help but have some of that character rub off on me.

– Frank Abagnale

I spent five years of my youth in prison – some very bad prisons.

– Frank Abagnale

One thing I’ve found is that if you educate and show people the risk, they will do something about it.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

I think my wife understood from the day I met her how important she was to me and how important it was for me becoming a husband and a father.

– Frank Abagnale

I’m so different from the egotistical, self-centred person I was when I did those things. And to watch someone acting out your memories on the screen is like reliving it. Like someone taking you back and showing you what you did.

– Frank Abagnale

We all grow up. Hopefully, we get wiser. Age brings wisdom, and fatherhood changes one’s life completely.

– Frank Abagnale

If I had walked into a dry cleaning store, and I had looked over, and the register drawer was open with money inside, I wouldn’t have taken it.

– Frank Abagnale

In the old days, a con man would be good looking, suave, well dressed, well spoken and presented themselves real well. Those days are gone because it’s not necessary. The people committing these crimes are doing them from hundreds of miles away.

– Frank Abagnale

If you took a child in London and took their iPhone and took them somewhere else in the country, they’d probably not be able to find their way back. That’s a shame.

– Frank Abagnale

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.

– Frank Abagnale

It’s really frustrating when you’re an identity-theft victim, and you go to the police and you say, ‘This guy in Florida, he stole my name and got a credit card – this is his address,’ and they say, ‘We don’t have jurisdiction in Florida. You need to go to the FBI.’

– Frank Abagnale

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