What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.

If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been 'Catch Me In Two Days'.

Why do the Yankees always win? The other team can't stop looking at the pinstripes.

What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.

A real man loves and respects his wife and is not only a good father but a man that his kids want to call 'Daddy.'

A real man loves his wife, and places his family as the most important thing in life. Nothing has brought me more peace and content in life than simply being a good husband and father.

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.

Almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there's a touch of class involved.

As the lawyer, I found most of it was a matter of research, which I was great at - that's what I did to death - and then basically persuading people that you're right, and they're wrong... I found that the easiest of all the professions to impersonate.

At the FBI, very rarely do they investigate crime under $100,000.

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.

Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living room at Christmas. My mother couldn't have been played more correctly.

Criminals know that if they stay under certain thresholds, nobody is going to come after them.

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.

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.

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.

Every form of payment has some risk associated with it.

Had I been older - maybe 25 or 30 - I would have never tried half the things I did because I would have rationalized everything and never did it.

I contend that there really are no more con men. There's no need for con men anymore. There's no need for the very sophisticated, suave guy, the well-dressed guy. Today, you steal with the computer from thousands of miles away - from China, from Libya, from Hong Kong. Your victim's never going to see you, so there's no need to be any of that.

I didn't like taking money from individuals.

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.

I don't believe that a piece of paper will excuse my actions. In the end, only my actions will.

I don't do online banking.

I don't use a debit card. The safest thing is a credit card because you're using the bank's money. If someone accesses your information, they are stealing the bank's money, not yours.

I have to be honest with you: When the FBI let me out of prison early to advise the agency on preventing fraud, I wasn't a changed person. I wasn't rehabilitated. But when I started working with the FBI, one of the most ethical groups of men and women in the world, I couldn't help but have some of that character rub off on me.

I kept a notebook, a surreptitious journal in which I jotted down phrases, technical data, miscellaneous information, names, dates, places, telephone numbers, thoughts, and a collection of other data I thought was necessary or might prove helpful.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

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.

I owe a debt to my country 800 times greater than I could ever repay.

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.

I served my time and came out of prison when I was just 26 and have worked with the government for 37 years. But people only remember me for what I did before that.

I speak at a lot of universities, and people are always worried about Facebook, and when I explain how to use it properly, they immediately go back and make those changes.

I spent five years of my youth in prison - some very bad prisons.

I taught at the FBI for four decades - how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

I think I was so successful, not because I was brilliant, but because I was so young. I had no fear of consequences.

I think my wife understood from the day I met her how important she was to me and how important it was for me becoming a husband and a father.

I use a credit card for everything - and I choose one of the ones which gives you money back.

I use a shredder for bank statements and phone bills. Most people use ribbon shredders that cut things straight: we can put those back together in an hour. Look for a security microcut shredder, which cuts papers into confetti.

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.

I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot; therefore, I must be a Pan Am pilot.

I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

I was just a guy who ran away from home at 16 because my parents were getting a divorce and the judge was making me choose which parent to live with. I didn't want to make that choice. I ended up in New York City.

I was very blessed it was Steven Spielberg who made the movie. He was very much into the redemption side of the story. They asked him in an interview why he had owned the rights to this story for 20 years before he made the movie, and he said, 'I wanted to see what the real Frank Abagnale did with his life before I immortalised him on film.'

I wasn't a Pan Am pilot or any other kind of pilot.

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.

I would have thought technology would have made it harder to do what I did.

I'm a true believer that you have a moral obligation to keep your employees honest, and that is why you have controls, so I'm never tempted or put in a position where I could do something to defraud my employer.

I'm so different from the egotistical, self-centred person I was when I did those things. And to watch someone acting out your memories on the screen is like reliving it. Like someone taking you back and showing you what you did.

If I check into a hotel, a lot of times, they know who I am.