Алаяқ және қауіпсіздік кеңесшісі Фрэнк Абагнейлдың тарихы

American security consultant and former fraudster

Frank William Abagnale Jr. ('/æ//b//ə//ɡ//n//eɪ//l/; born April 27, 1948) is an American security consultant, author, and convicted felon who committed frauds that mainly targeted individuals and small businesses. many of which have since been placed in doubt. In 2002, Abagnale admitted on his website that some facts had been overdramatized or exaggerated, though he was not specific about what was exaggerated or omitted about his life. In 2020, journalist Alan C. Logan provided evidence he claims proves the majority of Abagnale's story was invented or at best exaggerated. The public records obtained by Logan have since been independently verified by journalist Javier Leiva.

Frank William Abagnale Jr. was born in the Bronx, New York City, on April 27, 1948, to a French American mother, and an Jewish American father. He spent his early life in Bronxville, New York. His parents separated when he was 12 and divorced when he was 15 years old. In his autobiography, Abagnale says, because of this crime, he was sent to a reform school in Westchester County, New York (fitting the description of the Lincolndale Agricultural School) run by Catholic Charities USA. Abagnale is not mentioned by name, though, nor do any photographs of him appear in the Iona Preparatory School yearbooks from the time he ostensibly attended. Moreover, no alumni recall Abagnale ever attending the high school. The following month, in March 1965, Abagnale identified himself as a Scarsdale, New York, police officer and entered the apartment of a Mount Vernon, New York, resident claiming that he was investigating her teenaged daughter. Suspicious, the victim called the Mount Vernon police, who found Abagnale with a toy gun and a paper police badge. Abagnale was arrested and booked on a vagrancy charge after being identified in a lineup by the victim. The following day, Abagnale was ordered by the court to be committed to Grasslands psychiatric institute, in Westchester County, for observation. In June 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Abagnale in Eureka, California, for car theft after he stole a Ford Mustang from one of his father's neighbors. Abagnale was pictured in the local newspaper, seated in a car, being questioned by Special Agent Richard Miller of the FBI. He had financed his cross country trip from New York to California with blank checks stolen from a family business located on the Bronx River Parkway. Abagnale was also charged with impersonating a US customs official, although this charge was subsequently dropped. On July 2, 1965, this stolen car case was transferred to the Southern District of New York. but he was arrested for theft of checks in Tuckahoe, New York days later. The reverend introduced him to Louisiana State University faculty, who determined he was an "obvious phony". The reverend, after Abagnale told him he was a furloughed TWA pilot, became suspicious and called the airline, which informed him that Abagnale was a fraud. The following day, detectives determined that Abagnale had stolen blank checks from his host family and a local business in Baton Rouge, and he was subsequently charged with theft and forgery. Unable to make bail, he was convicted on June 2, 1969, and was sentenced to 12 years of supervised probation, but he soon fled Louisiana for Europe.

Two weeks after the Louisiana bench warrant was issued, Abagnale was arrested in Montpellier, France, in September 1969. He had stolen an automobile and defrauded two local families in Klippan, Sweden. He was sentenced to four months for theft in France, though he served only three months in Perpignan's prison. He was then extradited to Sweden, where he was convicted of gross fraud by forgery. He served two months in a Malmö prison, was banned from Sweden for eight years, and was required to compensate his Swedish victims (which he allegedly failed to do). None of the women were ever enrolled in Abagnale's fictional program, as his autobiography and film depict. and he received an additional two years for escaping from the local Cobb County jailhouse. Unwilling to return to his family in New York, Abagnale says he left the choice of parole location up to the court, which decided that he would be paroled in Houston, Texas. After his release, Abagnale stated that he performed numerous jobs, including cook, grocer, and movie projectionist; he was fired from most of those after he was discovered to have been hired without revealing his criminal past. He again posed as a pilot in 1974 to obtain a job at Camp Manison, a summer children's camp in Texas, where he was arrested for stealing cameras from his co workers. After he received only a fine, he obtained a position at a Houston area orphanage by pretending to be a pilot with a master's degree. This job had him finding foster homes for the children living at the orphanage. This ruse was eventually discovered by his parole officer, who swiftly removed him from his orphanage work and moved him into living quarters above his own garage, so he "could keep an eye on him". His next position was at Aetna, where he was fired and sued for check fraud. With that, he began a new career as a speaker and security consultant. Abagnale claimed he moved the sewage container aside and that no one heard a thing: "I took off running. I thought they were right behind me. What I didn't know was that the door was spring loaded and when it slammed shut the whole assembly fell back into place. Nobody heard anything because of the engines' roar." He moved with his wife, Kelly, and their three sons to Tulsa, Oklahoma. He and his family lived in the same house for the next 25 years. After their sons left home for college and careers elsewhere, Kelly suggested that she and Frank leave Tulsa. They decided to move to Charleston, South Carolina. which advises companies on secure documents. In 2015, Abagnale was named the AARP Fraud Watch Ambassador, where he helps "to provide online programs and community forums to educate consumers about ways to protect themselves from identity theft and cybercrime." In 2018, he began co hosting the AARP podcast The Perfect Scam about scammers and how they operate. He has appeared in the media a variety of times, including three times as guest on The Tonight Show, an appearance on To Tell the Truth in 1977, and a regular slot on the British network TV series The Secret Cabaret in the 1990s. The book about Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can, was turned into a movie of the same name by Steven Spielberg in 2002, featuring actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale. The real Abagnale made a cameo appearance in this film playing a French police officer taking DiCaprio into custody.

During his many speeches and his appearances on television, Abagnale has alleged many criminal exploits. In public lectures describing his life story, Abagnale has consistently maintained that he was "arrested just once," and that was in Montpellier, France. However, public records show Abagnale was arrested in New York (multiple times), California, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas. Despite public records showing Abagnale targeted individuals and small family businesses, Abagnale has long claimed publicly that he "never, ever ripped off any individuals." He made the same claim of never targeting individuals and small businesses to BBC journalist Sarah Montague and the Associated Press. According to Abagnale, the only individual he ever swindled was a Miami prostitute: "She tried to charge me $1,000 for an evening, so I gave her a $1,400 forged cashier's check, and got $400 in change." In 2002, Abagnale told the Star Tribune, "As long as I didn't hurt anyone, people never considered me a real criminal, my victims were big corporations. I was a kid ripping off the establishment." Individuals criminally targeted by Abagnale, however, have described the long term consequences of victimization: No record has been found of Abagnale ever being a member of the Louisiana Bar, and no evidence shows he ever worked as an assistant attorney general in Louisiana's Attorney General's Office. In 1978, the Louisiana State Bar Association reconciled all those who took the bar exam and concluded that Abagnale never took the exam using his own name or an alias; the State Attorney General's Office examined payments to all employees during the time Abagnale claimed he worked there and concluded that he never worked in the office using his name or an alias. After the film was released, Abagnale began to use the first person plural pronoun "we" to refer to the FBI; The dates of this anniversary celebration point to 1976 and do not line up with Abagnale's claim of a parole release deal. Abagnale was, according to United States Board of Parole and Federal Bureau of Prisons standard practice at the time, sent to a pre release center in Houston in 1973, within the 120 days prior to his actual federal parole date of February 8, 1974. describes an encounter with Abagnale. Winkler queried Abagnale on the specifics of his position at the FBI. Abagnale responded that he was, "a special agent". Winkler says, "You mean a full fledged special agent? ", to which Abagnale responded in the affirmative. In a 2018 interview broadcast on PBS, Abagnale publicly criticized former FBI director James Comey for his unprofessionalism during the 2016 US presidential election. In the same interview, Abagnale claims that the FBI is concerned that he is of retirement age: "The FBI always ask me when am I going to retire, because they don't want me to," said Abagnale. In interviews, Abagnale has claimed that his work with the FBI is pro bono, although he has claimed publicly that his company has made millions of dollars from contracts with the U. S. government: "Today, Frank Abagnale and Associates does $10.5 million of business per year, 90% of it with the federal government," he told his audience in 1988. In 1991, Frank Abagnale and his wife Kelly filed for bankruptcy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the court filings, Abagnale claimed that he had $1.6 million in debts and $308,000 in assets. Journalist Ira Perry was unable to find any evidence that Abagnale worked with the FBI; according to one retired FBI special agent in charge, Abagnale was caught trying to pass personal checks in 1978 several years after he claimed that he began working with the FBI. Abagnale claimed that Shea befriended and supervised him during his parole. When the film was released, an FBI spokesperson acknowledged that Abagnale had given lectures at the academy "from time to time," but denied that Abagnale had been given commendations by the agency as claimed in the film's marketing. At no point has the FBI made an official statement corroborating Abagnale's biographical claims, nor has the agency confirmed his extraordinary claims that he was sent into a military base as an expert on missiles, and into a secret lab in New Mexico. Abagnale has claimed in public lectures that he was discussed in detail in a coffee table book celebrating 100 years of the FBI. In his public lectures, Abagnale has taken on a pseudo spokesperson role for the FBI. In discussing recruitments, he states, "currently [2017] we take 1 in 10,000 applications." Overall approximately 11,500 applications per year are made for 900 positions at the FBI (2018 statistics), which is about one in 13 applicants. In 2020, Abagnale was confronted by one of his victims in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When asked why he talks about being an attorney general and passing the state's bar exam, and yet failing to acknowledge his arrest and conviction in Baton Rouge, Abagnale said, "That's because I work for the FBI."

In August 2022, Google disabled all comments and added a disclaimer to Abagnale's "Talks at Google", which now states: "Disclaimer: Google does not endorse or condone the content contained within this video, nor does it lay claim to the validity of the actions described herein. The following is presented unaltered as it was recorded on Nov 27, 2017, and remains on the Talks at Google YouTube channel for historical purposes." In the video disclaimer Google did not provide an explicit reason for the abnegation of Abagnale's video or whether or not it was part of their new initiative to work with journalists to combat misinformation and disinformation. However, according to investigative journalist Javier Leiva, the move was made in response to members of his audience. asked Abagnale, “So I wonder, in light of the ethics award you’re going to be presented tonight, would you come clean? Would you tell the truth about the stories you’ve told? Will you admit that you just lied to everybody, and you’re still conning them?” In his response Abagnale denied telling any lies or spreading any misinformation. He claimed he had nothing to do with his autobiography, the film, and the Broadway musical. The incident at Xavier University was not the first time Abagnale's story caused controversy on a university campus. In 1981, after criminal justice professor William Toney and his students debunked Abagnale's biographical claims, several universities cancelled Abagnale's appearances. In an attempt to provide compromise, the University of South Carolina asked Abagnale to sign an affidavit that would attest to the truthfulness of his biographical claims. The university informed Abagnale that he would still be allowed to give the speech and collect his speaking fee, even if he did not sign the affidavit, but if he refused, the university would warn the students at the outset of the speech that Abagnale had not promised to tell the truth. Abagnale refused to sign the affidavit, referring to the document as a "slap in the face". As skepticism of Abagnale's story spread, in part due to the work of Professor William Toney, he cancelled his own university bookings. In a letter to Georgia Southwestern State University, Abagnale wrote that it was wrong to profit from his criminal past by speaking about it to college campuses. Furthermore, in the letter to GSSU, Abagnale stated that he was cancelling all college speaking engagements because the criminal aspects of the life story he was presenting "[are] not something to which young impressionable minds should be exposed". In the midst of this controversy, Abagnale was queried by journalist John Dagley, who asked him if his biography was a lie, to which he replied: Abagnale maintains that meeting his wife was the motivation for changing his life. He told author Paul Stenning that he met her while allegedly working undercover for the FBI when she was a cashier at a grocery store.