You’ve either seen or are aware of the Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can. The film is a story of a con man named Frank Abagnale, a teenaged runaway who is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the film, the Abagnale character begins by forging checks and eventually poses as a substitute teacher, airline pilot, attorney, and doctor. In the end, Abagnale gives up the life of scamming and becomes a wealthy consultant to banks, law enforcement, and others who are interested in learning how to avoid falling victim to con artists like him. However, the reality of Frank Abagnale’s life is, in an odd way, much different than the one the film presents.

For over 50 years, Abagnale has told variations of these stories that you see in the film to audiences on TV game shows, talk shows, and before college students and other groups, often receiving large sums of money to tell them. He has written books that detail his past as a scammer and con man. In fact, he has made a rather lucrative career trading on his sordid record as a young man. And that may be Abagnale’s greatest scam of all.

What the film gets right about his past is that he was born in the Bronx in 1948, and his parents did get a divorce when he was 15. He lived with his father and step-mother before using his father’s credit card to run up a bill of over $3,500. That theft led his father to send him away to a boarding school. That’s the point that the facts about Abagnale’s past become murky. He has claimed at various times that it was a prestigious prep school but has also said it was a Catholic-operated reform school. A three-month stint in the US Navy was followed by several arrests for petty theft, car theft, stealing and forging checks, and for impersonating various police and federal officers. All of this activity saw him spend the next several years in and out of jails and prisons.

By the time he was 20, the young con artist impersonated an airline pilot and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He moved in with the family of an airline flight attendant he had met while pretending to be a pilot. For several months, he scammed that family and stole from their bank and credit card accounts. When he was found out, he was convicted of theft and forgery. But, before he could be sentenced, Abagnale escaped custody and flew to France in an effort to get away from all his trouble. More scams were conducted there and in Sweden. Again, he was caught and served a few months in prison. Finally, he was extradited back to the US.

Now about age 22, Abagnale served some more time for other cons he had done. Then, once he was out of jail, he bounced from job to job and con to con and jail to prison and back out again. Finally, in 1975, he had an idea. That’s when he approached a bank with a proposition. He would teach the bank’s employees how to spot bad checks in exchange for a consulting fee. He promised that if the bank found his work unsatisfactory, that they didn’t need to pay them. That was the start of Frank Abagnale’s security consulting firm. The other caveat of that first “straight” job was that the bank would tell other banks about his service. Soon, the banks were lining up to have him teach their employees all of his check faking tricks.

Of course, when he presented that first bank his credentials, the bank didn’t bother to check that he had made up most of his misdeeds and overstated his experience as a fraudster. This is about the time he began speaking to groups about his so-called (and self-labeled) exploits as a master forger. Truth told, he never forged more than a few thousand dollars’ worth of checks. But the stories fascinated audiences, even if they were, well, forgeries. All that exposure brought by the speaking engagements led to the book, which led to the TV appearances, which led to the film, which led to a sizeable income for the man.

Thus, most of what you saw on the movie screen was hokum. In fact, it’s fair to say that the best scam Frank Abagnale pulled was to convince everyone that he was a better crook than he really was.