How to outsmart a scam: Strategies from a legendary con man | Frank W. Abagnale | Big Think

It doesn't matter who you are. Anybody can be scammed. I mean, I know that I can be scammed. Anybody can be scammed. So, the target is not just necessarily someone who you might think is an easy pushover or that might not be real intelligent. It can be anybody.

So doing the research for this book, I realized that no matter how sophisticated the scam was, or no matter how amateur it was, and I looked at every type of scam, I found that there were really basically two red flags. At some point, someone was either going to ask me for money, and it had to be immediate. Go down to Walmart, get me a Green Dot card, read the number back to me, give me your bank account number, give me a credit card over the phone. It had to be right now, this moment.

Or I was going to ask you for information. What's your social security number? What's your date of birth? Where do you bank? What's your credit card number? Every scam has that red flag. So one of the things I realized is that you start to recognize those red flags no matter what the scam, whether it's a romance scam or it's someone trying to say it's a grandparent scam, sweepstakes scam. If you start to recognize those flags, you know it.

Of course, all con artists try to get people under the ether. The only thing that's really scary today is that 50 years ago when I did it, and there were con men and con women, which basically stood for confidence men, they had to gain your confidence, and it was one-on-one. You were sitting right in front of me. I had to dress well, speak well, have a good vocabulary. And, of course, you got to like me, know me, and we had a relationship.

Because of that, there was some emotion, and obviously, there was some compassion. I might have said, well, I'm not going to take this guy for all his money. He's kind of a nice guy. I'm just going to take some of his money. I don't want to leave him broke. The difference today is the con man is someone sitting in a kitchen with a cup of coffee in their pajamas on a laptop in Moscow. They never see you. You never see them. There is no emotion.

The victim never sees you. The victim doesn't know they're being victimized, so there is no compassion. I find that they rob you for every single penny they have, and there's no compassion involved at all. One of the things I've found doing the research for the book is that millennials are scammed more often than seniors, but seniors lose more money because they have more money. I actually realized that anybody can be scammed.

I do a podcast out of Washington, DC for AARP called The Perfect Scam. When people get scammed, we send an investigator out to interview them and talk to them, and then I later do a podcast about that particular scam. We've had two former FBI directors in their 70s and 80s now that have been scammed. You know, these are typically like grandparent scams.

A grandparent scam is one of the most common scams today where basically the phone rings in the evening, you go over, and the caller ID says that it's a New York police department. Right away, you believe the caller ID because it says it's NYPD. The easiest thing to do is manipulate caller ID. I can make it say U.S. Treasury, IRS, your brother, the neighbor next door, whoever I want it to say.

You pick up the phone, and they say this is Sergeant O'Rourke. We arrested your grandson. They give you the grandson's name. He was on the Westside Highway. He was DWI. He was driving this type of vehicle. They tell you his car. Of course, it registered in your mind, you know that's his car. He had a passenger; her name was, and you say, oh, that's his girlfriend.

And then they say he asked us not to call his parents, and they give you the parents' name. Of course, you know that. You recognize that. And they say he asked us to call you. And what it is is he needs to post bail in the next 24 hours or two hours or whatever they say. And if he doesn't, he'll have to spend the weekend in jail.

Oh, no, no, no, no. How could I do that? Well, you could just give me a credit card over the phone if you like. It's $500. And people fall for that, and that's what one of these FBI directors fell for, and they do it. But what happens today is they go to social media first. The grandson has pictures of his car. He has pictures of his girlfriend and her name, pictures of his family and their name.

They get all of that so that it sounds so realistic along with the caller ID. And if you've never heard of the grandparent scam or you weren't aware of it, obviously it sounds very real to someone. That's why, in writing this book, I always have felt that education is the most powerful tool to fighting crime. Thirty-five years ago, I went around the country talking to police departments about developing crime prevention units, and they thought I was crazy.

I said it's not just investigating crimes; it's preventing crimes. And today, there are crime prevention units all over the world. So, whether I'm training an FBI agent at the academy or I'm training a banker at a bank or I'm training a consumer, if I tell them here's the scam, here's how it works, this is the red flag, they're smart enough to catch it next time it comes up or remember it.

Typically, people are honest, thank God. And because they're honest, they don't have a deceptive mind. So when that phone rings or that email comes over or that call, they don't start immediately thinking this is a scam. Somebody is trying to rip me off. That never enters their mind unless somebody's taught them that it is a scam.