Through his multiple disguises, he aims to get the respect that has eluded him, girls who had never looked at him before, and most importantly, money he and his family had once had but then lost to the IRS. So if he dresses like a pilot, speaks like a pilot, and goes on airplanes – he’s a pilot. He became so experienced with cheque fraud that the FBI eventually turned to him for help in catching other cheque forgers.įrank (Leonardo DiCaprio) quickly becomes an expert at deception by using his charm and takes advantage of peoples’ natural assumptions. There’s a magic in their work, not necessarily good or legal magic, but magic just the same, and these movies reveal all the secrets that everybody wants to know, so that they can be in on the secret too.īased on the life of Frank Abagnale, who, before his 19th birthday, successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as trustworthy professionals such as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor, and a Louisiana parish prosecutor all this without even graduating high school. Every con seems to be met with a similar fascination as a kid seeing a card trick.

She was ultimately found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, and was sent to jail.Con artists may deceive, lie and trick everyone around them, and for some reason the audience loves them to get away with it. Using forged promissory notes supposedly from Carnegie, she secured thousands of dollars in bank loans from New York to Ohio, and by the time law enforcement caught up to her, she had scammed somewhere around $16.5 million in today's money. From pretending to be psychic to marrying and using her new husband's property as collateral for loans, she remained a huge fan of the heiress routine - and in 1903, she went big: Now calling herself Cassie Chadwick, she claimed she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. Over the following years, Bigley ran all kinds of scams. The bad checks she wrote were for more than the price, and store owners were happy to accommodate the young heiress with some cash back. There, she would present stores with documentation of her incoming inheritance, then make a purchase. She perfected the whole thing over the next few years, and in 1879 - now 22 years old - she headed to the big city of London, Ontario.

The con artist ost