b'2022 Post WPMAEXPOTHURSDAYMorning AMERICAN SECURITY: TODAYFeatured Frank Abagnale, a fraud prevention expert, bestselling author, and subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can.Frank is one of the worlds leading experts incybercrime, embezzlement, forgery and secure documents. He is an associate of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and has been associated with the FBI for over four decades, lecturing exten-sively at the FBI Academy and field offices. Frank is a faculty member at the National Advocacy Center (NAC), which isoperated by the Department of Justice Executive Office for the United States Attorneys. More than 14,000 financial institutions, corporations and law enforcement agencies use his fraudprevention programs. Abagnale believes that because punishment for fraud and recovery of stolen funds are so rare, prevention is the only viable course of action. His philosophy is that we need prevention, verification, and education. Out of (an annual) 110 billion stolen dollars, 91% are uncollectable. These dollars have funded narcotics, weapons, ter-rorism, human trafficking, and child exploitation (to name a few). Frank noted that identity theft losses increased 73% from 2019-2020. Thieves are stealing identities at the rate of one every two seconds. In 2018, 3.6 billion identity records were compromised. More than 14 billion identity records are available online, through the dark web. Year 2020 was record breaking for records compro-misesbreaches identified, and records reported lost. Cyberthieves new victims are children. A study of 40,000children found that more than 10% had been victims of identity theft. Victim information has been misused for governmentdocuments/benefits fraud (38.7%), credit-card fraud (17.4%), phone/utilities fraud (12.5%), bank fraud (8.2%), loan fraud (4.4%) and other frauds (21.8%). Frank suggested some waysto protect your childs identity.Cybercrime includes ransomware. To fight ransomware, Frank declared we must ban cryptocurrency. Abagnale said, We can live in a world with cryptocurrency or a world without ransom-ware, but we cant have both. (In 2020) there were 2,500 cases of ransomware reported, a 66% annual increaseand in 2020, ransomware victims paid hackers $350 million in cryptocurrency.Frank also warned to be aware of phishing scams. BetweenDecember 2016 and May 2018, businesses and consumersreported a 136% increase in losses related to phishing. The fraudulent transfers were sent globally to 115 different countries. 14 www.wpma.com / Spring 2022'