True Story Behind Catch Me If You Can Prototype Becomes Very Meta Very Fast

Now, we know what you're thinking: wasn't Frank Abagnale Jr. a con artist in the first place? And you're absolutely correct. That was the point of the entire story. But it turns out, the entire story of a fake was fake in itself.

Bear with us here because it's going to be a little more meta than you're probably ready for. Frank Abagnale Jr. is a man who raised a ton of money by claiming he was a genius con artist.

His memoir became an incredibly popular book, and Steven Spielberg created the amazing Catch Me If You Can movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Frank made a ton of money off of his story which he claimed to be true… Until it was thoroughly fact-checked and proved to be completely false.

Here's how the events unfolded according to Frank Abagnale Jr. — and according to actual facts.

According to Frank

If we were to believe his memoir, in the next five years after he turned 16, he:

• Impersonated a Pan Am pilot and flew over 3 mln miles to 82 countries for free;
• Impersonated and successfully worked as a physician, a sociology professor, and a lawyer in different states;
• Cashed in $2.5 mln worth of bogus cheques;
• All that while being pursued by the FBI all the time.

According to facts

Now, take a look at how all of his claims checked out:

• He impersonated a Pan Am pilot and flew in a jump seat just a couple of times;
• He only once pretended to be a doctor… to grope female students, and never impersonated a professor or a lawyer at all;
• He only managed to cash in $1,500 of bad fake cheques;
• He was caught almost immediately, by the local police.

Overall, during the five years between the ages of 16 and 21, Frank Abagnale Jr. only spent 14 months (!) away from a prison cell.

Not much time for all the daring cons he described — good thing those were all lies, or he wouldn't have had time to sleep at all during those fourteen months.

His stories about fighting the government and corporations never checked out: in reality, he was mostly stealing from common people.

His big love story was a lie: he convinced a girl into getting him acquainted with her parents by stalking her, then lived in their house for six weeks and run away with the $1,200 he'd stolen from them.

His redemption was fake, too: after promoting his made-up story, he kept pretending to have been the greatest conman of all time and stealing money off the common folk who trusted him.

Catch Me If You Can is a great movie. But the real-life Frank Abagnale Jr. never possessed a fracture of DiCaprio's character's genius — he was just a petty thief hiding behind a pompous facade of a fake story.