What the "OG fraudster" Frank Abagnale had to say at the Alloy client conference "imagine a future without fraud"?

Last week, the headliner of Alloy’s first in-person client conference, Frank Abagnale, delivered a thrilling speech at the beautiful Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica.

Frank Abagnale was best known for being the real world con man and imposter who inspired the 2002 Steven Spielberg film, “Catch Me if You Can,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. He perpetrated numerous identity thefts in the 1980s.

What is lesser known is that Mr. Abagnale has since taught in the FBI academy for forty-five years to teach the agents his craft and has published four books, the most recent one being “Scam Me If You Can” in 2019. A beautiful pun!

Mr. Abagnale’s appearance at Alloy’s client conference last month was definitely one of the most anticipated events of the two-day conference. Alloy’s clients came from all over the places to gather and exchange notes on how each other - credit unions and fintechs - has leveraged Alloy for their onboarding and transaction monitoring workflows.?

Mr. Abagnale began his speech by making a shocking statement. “Every person sitting in this room or reading this piece today has already had their identity stolen.”?

He shared his personal tale of residing in South Carolina and being the victim of a statewide social security fraud. South Carolina residents became victims of a large-scale identity theft. The State Department of Revenue was hacked and hence four million of taxpayers and business information were stolen. In response to the breach, the state government responded by giving every resident one full-year of free credit monitoring.

At this moment in his speech, Mr. Abagnale introduced the concept of “warehousing” to the audience.?

Criminals would warehouse data for 3-5 years after a mass data breach. In an event that a titanic pool of information, valuable information, was stolen, the criminals would be extremely patient and wait for a long period before acting on it. In the case of the state of South Carolina, it was exactly four years later that people started to see their identity being used to apply for new credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages and so on.?

Besides being extremely patient and having the propensity to warehouse stolen information to harvest at the peak value, criminals love stealing children’s information. Mr. Abagnale shared a second statistic:? “10% of the children have their identity stolen.” To understand better why children’s identity was especially valuable, Mr. Abagnale proposed the following quiz.

Suppose a criminal stole three identities:?

1. A 42-year old multi-millionaire
2. A 12-year old child
3. An infant

Which of the identities is the most expensive one on the dark web?

The correct answer is #3. The infant’s identity!?

Because an infant has no identity!!

An infant’s identity would sell for most, for exactly the same reason that this individual has no identity in our society, hence, the criminal can start with a clean sheet of paper and paint in whatever strokes or color he conjures.

The second reason why an infant or a child’s identity is much more valuable than an adult is the length of time a criminal can use it. We can safely assume that most children won’t start to apply for credits until they are 18 years old. No one would find out that an identity is stolen until many years later.

The criminal can use, reuse, sell and resell a child’s identity for many years before tapping out.?

Of course it’s never enough to capture a fraud master’s mind in just an hour. If you are interested in staying up to date with Mr. Abganle’s thought leadership in fraud, check out his fraud bulletin which he publishes periodically (https://www.abagnale.com/pdf/).

Also, stay in tuned with Alloy’s future events and exciting fraud detection/prevention analytics and tools here - https://www.alloy.com/fraud.