Frank Abagnale Wasn’t Honest About Lying
Even if the name Frank Abagnale Jr. isn’t immediately recognizable to you, we’re willing to bet you’re at least somewhat familiar with his “work.” See, Abagnale’s life was adapted into an extremely well-received Steven Spielberg joint starring pre-bison-liver-eating Leonardo DiCaprio, titled Catch Me If You Can.
The film depicts the presumably true story of his many cons, including impersonating a Pan Am pilot, an actual doctor, a sociology professor, and a lawyer. These scams allegedly allowed the conman to cash upwards of 17,000 false checks totaling some $2.5 million dollars. Abagnale's incredible grifts also garnered the attention of the FBI, and caused Christopher Walken to shove a tiny watch into his butthole.
Wait, that’s a different movie. Still … Christopher Walken is a national treasure, and we will work tirelessly to preserve real estate in your brain for the Butt Watch story.
Amazingly — according to Abagnale's autobiography and, yes, the movie — all this happened between the ages of 16 and 21. Once he became of legal drinking age, the guy went “straight.” In fact, he now runs Abagnale & Associates, a firm that advises companies on how to not get conned by jerks exactly like Abagnale. Who, again, claims to no longer be one of those jerks.
And yet, a man named Jim Keith wasn’t quite so sure. According to a recent article in the New York Post:
“In 1981, Keith, then manager of security at a JC Penney in St. Louis, heard Abagnale speak at an area high school about turning his life around. Keith and a local detective were in the audience. Much of the speech was filled with ‘technical information regarding bad checks’ and it was, to Keith, incorrect.
‘We walked away with a sick feeling that we and those students were sold a bill of worthless goods,’ Keith said.
Infuriated, he began researching Abagnale.”
What he found was, well, infuriating. For example, Abagnale did forge checks, and pretended to be a pilot. He really did go to, and escape from, prison in Europe. But almost everything else? “Inaccurate, misleading, exaggerated or totally false.” He never passed himself off as a professor or a doctor or a lawyer or a “consultant to the US Senate Judiciary Committee.” Because even back then, people could tell if you didn’t know what you were talking about.
But Keith’s not alone. Abagnale's former agent called Frank a “two-bit criminal,” and Alan C. Logan, author of The Greatest Hoax On Earth, makes the point that, “[The] time [Abagnale] wasn’t in some prison or jail [between the ages of 16 and 21] amounts to about 14 months. Cashing 17,000 checks in that period is 40 checks per day.” You don’t have to be a check scientist to recognize this as logistically impossible. Even local journalists as early as 1978 were calling Abagnale out; not just on the success of his small-time cons, but whether or not all of them, you know, even existed.
See, you might be thinking, “So his greatest con is convincing people he’s a great conman when actually he’s not much of a conman at all? Hold up; isn’t that, in and of itself, an incredible con, and worthy of celebration by The Modern Rogue, and Steven Spielberg, I guess?”
Maybe if, like he always claims, his cons only targeted big businesses. Or if his long con ever ended. But they didn't, and it hasn't. Abagnale mostly found success screwing over regular people, not corporations.
In one of Frank’s big talks with Google, he claims, "I was actually arrested just once in my life when I was 21 years old by the French police …" despite the fact that, no, he was also arrested in Texas for stealing from the small camp he worked at. Oh, and also he was arrested in New York for stealing and cashing checks from a small, local business. And yeah, there was that one time he stole a rental car and was arrested. Also, fun fact: He never flew to Europe with a bunch of hot women while pretending to be an airline pilot because, well, he'd been arrested for being a fraud. As in, the only big business he seems to have actually targeted saw right through his big-brained con.
But Abagnale didn’t stop there. Again, according to the New York Post and Logan, he stole $1,200 from the parents of a woman named Paula Parks Campbell. He also allegedly stole $20,000 from a Nelda McQuarry in an apparent real-estate scam. Which, as you may recognize, aren’t examples of sticking it to The Man so much as they’re just … stealing from women.
Oh, but don’t think him being 74 years old means he’s slowing down this turd tornado of a story. In 2021, Frank co-hosted the AARP podcast “The Perfect Scam” to ostensibly help older folks not get scammed as often. However, according to a company spokesperson, Abagnale is “no longer associated with AARP.”
And that Google talk with 15 million views? There's a disclaimer at the beginning that clearly states, “[Google does not] lay claim to the validity of the actions described herein.”
Hell, as recently as March 2022, Abagnale surprised students at a high school in Georgia who were performing a stage adaptation of Catch Me If You Can. Here he is on video reiterating that, “Everything I did, I did between the age of 16 and 21. I was caught when I was 21.”
To be fair, he was caught when he was 21. But also before, and also after, which anyone can confirm via a cursory scan of public records.
Listen, we’ve always prided ourselves on telling people, very intentionally, that we’re going to tell them a lie in order to trick them. It's why we can run a store called Scam Stuff, because we're brutally honest. Abagnale hasn’t been, and it seems weird that this long con persists. Here's a guy that is straight-up lying about lying, and getting paid handsomely for it.
Sure, that sounds pretty scoundrelly. But stepping on the small guy to get there doesn’t seem like the best way to go about it.
Jordan runs his own YouTube channel AND his own Twitter.
