During the 1960s, Abagnale attended high school in Long Island. His father built a profitable stationery store on Madison Avenue in New York City. When his father suffered a business loss and his parents divorced, the son left home in 1964 with around $100 in his pocket. The sixteen-year-old vowed to make up for his father's losses and bring his parents together again. To this end, in the years that followed, the young man developed an unusual talent for creative transformation, starting with forging his driver's license by bringing his birth year forward by 10 years. Even before he turned 21, the teenager, who appeared much older, had already posed as a pilot for the Pan Am airline, a doctor, a lawyer and a professor of history. Through forged checks, Abagnale secured a fortune of over $2.5 million.

Throughout his 5-year criminal career, Abagnale was patiently pursued by FBI agent Carl Hanratty in a sort of cat-and-mouse game. At the end of his criminal career, he was wanted in 26 countries and the entire USA as "The Skywayman", who, thanks to a fake "Pan Am" identity card, repeatedly managed to escape by plane to other states and countries. After the fraudster was finally arrested in France in 1969, he was extradited to Sweden after a French prison sentence, where he also served time in a Malmö prison. Ultimately, Abagnale was extradited to the United States and sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 1974, however, the US government offered him early release in return for revealing his criminal skills and knowledge. Abagnale decided to work with the FBI, where he then held expert seminars in its financial crimes unit. Authorities and companies around the world soon became interested in the former document forger's expert knowledge.

As independent entrepreneurs, "Abagnale & Associates" today offer services for expert assessment and advice in the area of documents and certificates with great success on an international scale. Abagnale married and had three sons. With his company profits, the fraud expert paid back the entire $2.5 million that he had once swindled. The quick-change artist and creative fraudster has an intelligence quotient of 136. In 2001, Abagnale published his book "The Art of the Steal", a guide to preventing fraud and counterfeit crime. Based on Abagnale's autobiography of the same name from 1980, Steven Spielberg filmed the life of the cunning fraudster in 2002: In "Catch me if You can" the actor Leonardo DiCaprio plays the young Abagnale.

In the run-up to the US presidential election in November 2004, Abagnale spoke out in favor of the incumbent President George W. Bush: As an expert in document forgery, he declared the recently published notes of National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Kilian about alleged misconduct by Lieutenant Bush in 1972 Counterfeits. A little later, the television station "CBS", which had released the documents during the election campaign, had to admit the mistake and apologize. In 2015, he was named an AARP Fraud Watch Ambassador, where he helps "provide online programs and community forums to educate consumers about ways to protect themselves from identity theft and cybercrime." In 2018, he began co-hosting the AARP podcast "The Perfect Scam."