Every breach you look at occurred because somebody inside did something they weren't supposed to do. Sometimes there's an accomplice, but most of the time, it's innocent.
I didn't sit outside the bank and plan. I just went in and ad libbed because I was so young. But I was smart enough to know I would absolutely get caught.
Airline pilots are men to be admired and respected. Men to be trusted. Men of means. And you don't expect an airline pilot to be a local resident. Or a check swindler.
There are many ways to manipulate chip cards. For example, a number of years ago when American Express issued the first chip card, criminals would take a small hammer with a little device and bang the chip to destroy it without hurting the physical appearance of the card.
Had I been older, I would've never been able to pull it off because I would've analyzed it to death. When I was 16, there was no such thing as 'what if.'
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.
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.
While I was on an undercover assignment in Texas, I met my wife, Kelly.
We should be very concerned: if identity theft is so simple to do, what's to stop me from entering this country and assuming the identity of someone else for the sole purpose of living here illegally for terrorist reasons? That alone would be a concern.
The police can't protect consumers. People need to be more aware and educated about identity theft. You need to be a little bit wiser, a little bit smarter and there's nothing wrong with being skeptical. We live in a time when if you make it easy for someone to steal from you, someone will.
I don't do online banking.
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.
Every case involving cybercrime that I've been involved in, I've never found a master criminal sitting somewhere in Russia or Hong Kong or Beijing. It always ends up that somebody at the company did something they weren't supposed to do. They read an email, went to a website they weren't supposed to.
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.
I was a millionaire twice over and half again before I was twenty-one. I stole every nickel of it and blew the bulk of the bundle on fine threads, gourmet foods, luxurious lodgings, fantastic foxes, fine wheels, and other sensual goodies.
You have to be smarter and a wiser businessperson and consumer. You have to learn to protect yourself through education.
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.
Banks are so protected from liability they would have to really do something that was their mistake in order for them to be liable for it. Banks don't look at signatures. They're processing millions of checks and they have very little liability.
One of the most popular scams is what they call account takeover. You write me a check, and I simply go online to a check-printing service and order 200 checks with your account information.
I went to the library and learned how checks work. I found out that routing numbers are like zip codes: the checks are sent to the bank that correlates to the routing number. If I manipulate those numbers to a bank far away, it would take longer to get back to the bank, which gave me more time to write more bad checks.
