"Stealing Your Life" by Frank Abagnale

Frank Abagnale is best known for writing a rip-roaring memoir that was adapted into the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks/Leonardo DiCaprio movie "Catch Me If You Can".


The scenes where Frank impersonates a PanAm pilot are my favorite - I think of them everytime I travel through MIA/Miami.

I contacted Frank (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) right after seeing the movie, to see if there was a way we could team up to fight Identity Theft.

At the time, Frank was helping to put together PrivacyGuard, now one of the most widely-deployed solutions on the market. We decided to keep in touch, once our respective identity protection products - PrivacyGuard, and SafeCentral (then called VirtualATM), launched.

As it turns out, Frank's product beat me to market by three years. And, as I recently found out, he followed up the launch of PrivacyGuard with an outstanding book on the identity theft problem.

Called "Stealing Your Life", the book is one of the best-researched and practical books on identity theft yet written - and easily the most readable.

As in "Catch Me If You Can", Frank is able to detail what criminals are thinking as they're plotting to steal your money. The stories he has to tell in "Stealing Your Life" are disturbing - in some cases, appalling.

I'm going to pick up on a couple that I have some additional color on and share them over the next week or so. In the meantime, I strongly suggest you go out and find this book, or order a copy through Amazon.

You won't find a more informative book on the wide-ranging forms of identity theft out there, and you certainly won't find another written by a former confidence guy.

If you'd like to review our own solution to identity theft, Authentium SafeCentral, just head over to our site and download the free trial version.