The Real Story of Frank Abignale Jr.

Catch Me If You Can is a movie based on a true story that took place in the 1960’s about a teenage boy named Frank Abignale Jr. His parents began to go through a divorce after his father ran into some trouble with the IRS and they were forced to move out of their large home and into a small apartment, so Frank decided to run away. After he ran away and ran out of money he managed to commit mass amounts of fraud to cash checks for millions of dollars in numerous amounts of countries.

He impersonated a pilot, a doctor, and even a lawyer. As the amount of checks cashed ran up an FBI agent, Carl Hanratty, began tracking him. He was eventually caught at the age of 19 where he was taken to a French prison and then returned to the United States and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He only served five years of that term. He was released under the condition that he would work for the FBI in helping them catch other criminals committing check fraud and educating the FBI about check fraud.

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He helped develop the designs of current checks to make it more difficult to commit fraud.

All three of the elements contained within the fraud triangle are present and is why I believe Frank Abignale Jr. was motivated to commit the fraud that he did. The main reason and motivation for committing the check fraud was so his parents would get back together.

That was the whole reason any of it happened in the first place. If his dad had not have had trouble with the IRS and his mom would not have been having an affair, they would’ve stayed in their large home, the parents would not have got divorced, and he never would have ran away and became such a high profile criminal. He had a lot of pressures that he went through, the first being when he arrived at his new school and impersonated the substitute teacher. He could tell he did not fit it and was pressured into posing as the teacher. After that it was all financial pressures. He was pressured into impersonating the Pan Am pilot and committing the fraud with the payroll checks. Frank also had a pressure to stop committing fraud because of his fiancé and their plan to get married, but he had to stay on the run. Opportunity was also present throughout Franks run and probably the biggest reason he was able to commit the amount of fraud that he did. The opportunity that he saw and seized when the teacher was not there, the opportunity to pose as the school reporter which he used to get the information that helped him with the Pan Am pilot fraud. Opportunity presented itself when he was caught at the hotel he was staying at by Carl but tricked him into believing he was a secret service agent and escapes.