percent of the students said that they did. Like it was okay.
I believe we should be teaching ethics as early as maybe fifth grade, but we're not doing it. Not long ago, I visited two major pharmaceutical companies. Abbott Laboratories and Glaxo Wellcome, and both of them told me that they had brought ethics training in house. They established their own ethical standards, and they require their employees to go through training. They've had to create their own code of conduct, because it's not being done at home.
When I talk to people about con artists, they always ask me, well, is there a certain type of person to beware of? It's been my experience, on both sides of the law, that there is no profile of who's a con artist or forger. I've seen men who were eighty years old and women in their teens commit the same types of fraud. There may be a profile for bombers or serial killers, but not for the confidence man. Most of the time, it's the people you least expect who steal from you. Of all the calls I get from corporate managers lamenting that an employee stole from them, it's never, "Well, I had this person and six months later I found out he was embezzling from me." Instead, it's always, "This man worked for me for twenty years. He was a saint. I trusted him like my brother. I can't believe he stole from me." It's far more often the long-term employee than the newly-hired one who steals from you. In the world of the con, the unexpected becomes the expected.
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
As easy as these crimes are to commit, I firmly believe that most of them are easily prevented. Banks and companies simply have to learn to secure their systems as best they can. And you have to be a very smart consumer today.
I travel all over the world talking about fraud, and one of the interesting things is that in Europe or Australia, even in Canada, the societies are very proactive. Americans are very reactive. A guy in Britain, for instance, will say, "This check? We could use this check, but then somebody might do this or might do that, so let's fix it so he can't do that." In the U.S., the attitude is, "We'll use this. If we have a problem, we'll fix it." They worry about it later on. In fact, 90 percent of those who hire me to design secure documents, they've only hired me because somebody counterfeited their documents. No company has ever called me in to design their check ahead of a problem. It's always, "Somebody really got to us for a ton of money, and we don't want that to happen again."
It's much better to avoid becoming a victim than trying to figure out how to get your money back once you become a victim. Once you're a victim, you won't get your money back. Everyone has to start being proactive. You have to ask yourself every time you go on the Internet, which is probably every day, what information am I putting out there, and how could someone use that information? The crime of the future is identity theft, when some stranger acquires enough of the basic information about you that, when it comes to buying things on credit and making withdrawals from the bank, he in effect becomes you. It's already the fastest-growing crime in America, as criminals assume other people's identity in disturbing numbers. That's what happened to Michelle Brown, whose ordeal I'll return to in the final chapter.
In the following chapters, I plan to take you into the world of the confidence man. I'm going to tell you about some of the most ingenious scams that I've encountered during my twenty-five years as a fraud specialist. I'll tell you how to spot a bogus check and how to recognize a counterfeit bill. I'll tell you why a piece of Scotch tape can make a check worth a lot more, and why you shouldn't write your grocery list on a deposit slip. I'll tell you about how a man made a considerable amount of money off supposedly broken windows, and why criminals iron credit cards. I'll tell you about the mustard squirter and the rock in the box, about the Vickers Gang and their long-running refund scam, about how to earn $100,000 from a demolished car, and why a thief brings glue with him to the ATM. This