Frank Abagnale started his career as a con artist at the young age of 15. His first victim was his own father.
His crimes escalated quickly to include—by the time he was 19—numerous instances of bank and check fraud along with months of impersonating an airline pilot, an attorney, and more.
As a fake commercial pilot, Abagnale reportedly rode on over 250 free flights totaling over 1,000,000 miles.
Frank was eventually caught, and served time in both foreign and U.S. prisons.
Frank’s short criminal career is and was simply amazing to some.
But we can learn even more from what happened after Frank cleaned up his act.
After just 5 years in federal prison, Frank was released as part of a deal with the FBI.
As part of the deal, frank would give the FBI regular assistance with investigations into crimes like those he had committed.
To put it plainly, Frank was an expert at counterfeiting and check fraud… and the FBI wanted to use his expertise. Frank continued to have a legitimate working relationship with the FBI for over 30 years.1
We can learn a big lesson from this.
The FBI understands something that you should understand too if you want to get the “real” dirt on anything you plan to buy, use, or sign up for.
“To learn the truth about anything, you must go to the REAL experts who are immersed in it.”
Frank was immersed in his life as a con artist.
He knew every trick in the book.
(In fact—if you believe the stories—he invented half of the tricks in the book.) So the FBI sought his help.
You can use this simple but incredible FBI tactic in your own life by going to the trenches to get the information you’re looking for.
Here are some examples:
Who should you ask about the reliability of any car?
To start with: NOT the people who sell the car. Instead, find mechanics who have worked on a wide variety of cars.
Ask the mechanics about the reliability of the car you’re considering.
Another source of information: commercial car fleets.
Any owner or manager—and most workers—in commercial car fleets will be able to tell you about the reliability and common problems associated with the cars they use.
These are just ideas but hopefully you get the point: go to the people who REALLY know about the car you’re considering.
How do you know if a computer is fast and reliable?
Again, the last person you should ask is the person trying to sell it to you. Instead, find an expert—someone immersed in computers.
Again, this can be done by calling a local computer repair shop.
It can also be done by asking business owners or others who have purchased or used a lot of computers.
This could be a simple matter of noticing the brand of computer being used at a business, and inquiring with a worker or manager about the reliability of the computers and/or their experience with the brand/company.
Who knows what refrigerators work best?
A simple approach, here too, is to call multiple appliance service centers and simply ask which refrigerators break often, what the common problems are, and which brands and models you can expect to be the least error prone.
How do you know what kind of problems you can expect with any purchase?
When considering an online service, a purchase of a “long term use” item or anything that may involve expected or unexpected bumps and hiccups along the way, your best source of information is NOT necessarily the happy customers and users of those items.
Instead, look for people who have had trouble with the item or service in question.
Look for negative reviews, delivery problems, and other issues… and most importantly: look at how those problems were solved or were not solved.
This will tell you a lot.
For online services this may be a matter of visiting their help pages or forums and looking at the amount of difficulty or ease with which users are able to get help.
In other cases it might mean calling the customer service number instead of the sales number, to see if the assistance you get is as good on the back end as it appears to be on the front (sales) end.
Using these and a variety of other tactics based on the FBI’s method of seeking help, you can get to the bottom of almost anything!
(1) Sources: Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale, ISBN 9780767905381 and WikiPedia.org
NOTE: This report was excerpted from the “Real Cash Secrets” Home Study Course.
To learn more, click here:
http://zodipublishing.com/real-cash-secrets-home-study-course-full-description/