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Catch Me If You Can
It has been said that success depends on three things: skill, luck, and timing. Had Bill Gates been born six hundred years ago, he'd be assistant shit-shoveler for the Duke of Silesia. Conversely, Charlemagne, if born today, would probably be an auto mechanic. Sometimes you read about somebody whose skills were so remarkably out of place that you marvel at the thought of what they could have accomplished if they had only been born in a different time and place. Charles Babbage was born 100 years too soon. John Law, given the chance, would have ruled Wall Street.
Catch Me If You Can is the apparently true story of a man named Frank Abagnale. In the mid-1970s, when still a teenager, he ran away from home and supported himself by forging checks. To call him a forger, however, is to call Frank Lloyd Wright a guy who builds houses -- a simplification that does injustice to his tremendous skills. Abagnale developed fully documented alternate identities, including that of a Pan Am pilot, a pediatrician, a public prosecutor, and a college sociology professor. In each case, he was able to forge authenticating documents, and in many cases, he was able to procure the actual certificates, passcards, uniforms, and other accountrements of the trade. He was so convincing that, when accused by airport officials of being a fake pilot, other pilots (some of whom had known him for years) rose to defend him!
Under these guises (but especially in his role as airline pilot), Abagnale forged millions of dollars in checks, and defrauded banks around the world. He was able to avoid capture in part because his persona was very convincing, but also because he revolutionalized the art of check-kiting, printing false routing information on the bottom of each check that would send them circling the United States for days or weeks before a human intercepted them and determined that they were fake. Also, as a 'pilot', he was able to ride for free around the United States, Europe, and Asia, spreading his fake checks over a huge number of different banks in different cities. This made him much harder to catch.
Why is this book appropriate for Slashdot readers? You can take it as a lesson in hacking for somebody who was never given the chance to use a computer. Abagnale hacked the banking system; he hacked airline industry procedures. He even hacked the Swedish penal system. He found and exploited fault modes that normal users had never noticed. You can also take the book as a primer in social engineering. Abagnale would never have been able to get away with his hacks, especially the early ones, if he had not understood how to charm a bank teller. In fact, his choice of airline pilot as his first alternate identity was driven in part by the realization that female bank tellers would swoon for a man in the pilot's uniform.
What's Bad?
As in any book by a rogue and con man, there is no way that 100% of this book is true, and you're never really sure when you are reading an anecdote that was made up. You will probably find yourself reading each chapter while sniffing for B.S. Personally, I found two episodes particularly suspect -- his pretending to be a stock broker (his grasp of the terminology was much to weak to fool anybody really in the financial markets), and his claim to have fooled eight college girls into travelling around Europe with him for a Summer, thinking they were working for Pan Am.
The most convincing stories were those in which he makes an error -- other people caught him making mistakes so subtle that an outsider would probably never have made them up. For example, airline pilots catching him in an error about which carriers served which cities, or a Harvard Law graduate catching him in an error about the professors with which he had studied.
What's Good?
I have no doubt that, had he been born in a slightly different environment, Abagnale would have been a fiersome computer hacker (in the positive or negative sense). His model is a valuable one, even if he used his creative skills to evil ends. Most people take for granted that barcodes are magic, that passcards separate real employees from the masses, and that anybody with the right jargon and the right clothing is in the right place. In some sense, we run our society (certainly our schools and businesses) like the insect hives that fiercely resist any outsider. Once the invader gets inside, it's treated like a member of the family. Read correctly, Abagnale's story can be both an inspiration and a warning. It inspires the reader to find the weaknesses in the systems around him, and it warns us to beware of our natural instinct to trust people who seem like us. Sometimes they're faking, and sometimes they do not have our best interests at heart.
By the way, Abagnale was eventually caught and served time for his crimes, but ended up running a secure-documents company in Washington, DC, and teaching courses on financial fraud for the FBI.
Stern is the president of Information Markets Corp.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
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Surprise! You've been scammed!
I know this to be true, because I met him one time, and he told me that he's really just using the book to raise money for a liver transplant for his 12 year old little girl, who's waiting at the Shriner's Hospital in Houston. So do like I did, and send him some money, right now!
But don't believe his cockamamey stories about being able to fool people.
I first read this one about 10 years ago, and keep a paperback copy for "reference". One recurring theme in the book is one that any Social Engineer learns early on: Act like you're supposed to be there/doing that.
The author of the book spent time spoofing as an airline pilot, doctor, lawyer, and other trades. In each case he managed to fool people in these trades into believing that he belonged. There are a lot of good Think On Your Feet examples in the book as well.
Excellent book, a must read, IMO.
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What is it with the current trend to romanticising criminals and their lifestyles, no matter what they do? Sure, this man isn't exactly a serial rapist, but there are other books out there which both allow criminals to attempt to justify and/or glorify what they did as well as profit from them. This is a pretty sad indication of today's culture.
And surely this sort of thing is just cruel to the victims of these criminals? If your loved one was murdered by some psycho and then you saw his book everywhere talking about how he did it you'd be both disgusted and upset? Why should people who have been victims of crime have to deal with this additional indignity?
Sorry, but criminals should not be lauded for their deeds. It's only a small step from there to a state in which crime becomes accepted as a fundamental part of life, not something which we should be attempting to get rid of.
Well, he is great if he is the same guy that I saw as a guest on various talk shows in the 1970's. Sounds exactly like the same guy.
If anybody has access to old Tonight Show archives, try to find one with Abagnale being interviewed by guest host George Carlin, from around 1975 or so (not kidding, younger readers). Abagnale tells a story of how he was able to pass a forged check to a very expensive prostitute/call girl (memory fuzzy on where it was) in a very pricy hotel, also paid for with a bad check. Oh yes, I think he got several hundred dollars US change back from her.
On interviews of the period, he covers how to use magnetic ink to forge deposit slips and place them in bank lobbies so that all deposits processed with those slips dump into an account of the forger's choice. Also how he created a fake night deposit box, stood guard on it all evening and had 2 rentacops or real cops (forgot) help him load it into his "security van" because it was too heavy for him to lift.
He never mentioned that many of these methods could be used for revenge too, i.e., how would you explain a couple million dollars in your bank account from forged deposit slips?
His stories are fantastic, excellent interview, excellent speaker too. Highly recommended, now I have to get the book!
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Whether all or some of this is true or not the thing that creeps me out the most is that in many situations there is no qualitative difference between success and failure, between truth and bullshit, between having a skill and making it up. Sure we've all been in jobs over our heads sometime in our lives but what does it say when a guy can get behind the controls of an airliner and take off and land w/o screwing it into the tarmac?
So is everyone just an overvalued bullshit burger flipper? Does it really matter that your vascular surgeon went to school? Do you we all wear smocks and have our names stitched on our shirts only we don't know it? Stories like this in a small way convince me more and more to pay little if any attention to experts, professionals and specialists.
By example the third or fourth leading cause of death in America is apparently, if you believe the news in the last 6 months, medical malpractice and incompetance. And these are the people ostensibly trained to perform these jobs. And think about this the next time you have to power up your laptop in the patdown lane in the airport. Virtually every air traffic death since the inception of commercial air travel was the result of human error; either in the air on the maintenance floor or in the control tower, or, worse yet, the absolute refusal to heed weather warnings.
I saw this guy speak at a Chamber of Commerce banquet about 12 years ago. He generally assumed the identity of the profession but avoided the job. He claimed that as a pilot he only sat in the big chair once (with auto-pilot engaged) and as a doctor he let all the interns make their own diagnosis and decisions (luckily he wasn't called upon to fix any of their mistakes). How hard of a concept it that to handle? Your manager probably pretends to be an engineer/admin/programmer/tech but doesn't actually do any of those things.