Readers, a hilariously obvious fraud is in the news once again, which in my part of the world is a bit like turning on the Bat-Signal. Remember that Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life scammer Frank Abagnale? As played by DiCaprio, it’s an eminently winning role: Spielberg tells a tale of how, before the age of 19, young Frank pulled off millions of dollars in cons by convincingly impersonating everyone from an airline pilot to a doctor to a lawyer, only finally being caught by a rumpled Tom Hanks.
Alas, pretty much none of it turns out to be true. In a rather predictable development, Abagnale turns out to have been lying to the world about being a world-class liar: Sure, he was an authentic white-collar criminal with a record, but aside from temporarily wearing a pilot’s uniform for a few months in 1970 to pass forged checks — not really the most glamorous of crimes — none of his other stories check out at all. (Whether this makes him a “genuine fraud” remains a semantic paradox for the philosophers to ponder.)
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