be a con man with a con man's idiosyncratic personality. You had to be facile. You had to be persuasive, with good improvisational skills, and you needed icy self-control. You were taking something and replicating it, not perfectly, and you had to make someone believe it was the real thing, make them believe it sufficiently that they would cash it. Today, criminals can make a traveler's check or counterfeit bill that is so good that it doesn't take any acting skills to walk up to a teller and pass it off as the real thing. Someone who truly looks like a crook can get away with it.
Bear in mind, the person accepting counterfeit bills and forged checks these days is far less trained than in the past. Years ago, bank tellers were professional employees with months of training. Banks don't want to pay benefits anymore, and so they don't bother with full-time employees. They hire part-time help, and they don't give them any more than the most superficial training. If a bank teller can't tell the difference between a good hundred-dollar bill and a phony one, what hope is there for a hotel clerk or a sales clerk at the Gap?
Wherever I go, I find that security is pretty dreadful. Four years ago, I went to the Las Vegas Airport United Airlines ticket counter and was asked to show my driver's license in order to pick up my ticket. In my haste to catch my plane, the ticket clerk forgot to return the license. When I got back to the Midwest, where I live, I went to the Driver's License Bureau, told them that I had lost my license, and they issued me a new one on the spot. A week later, an envelope arrived from United with my license. Now I had two. Since I travel a lot, I kept the old one in my briefcase so it would be handy to display at airports. Soon, the old license expired, but, as an experiment, I kept offering it for identification to see if anyone would notice that it was no longer valid. For four years - at airports, banks, and stores - hundreds of salespeople and clerks have looked at that license. Not one has noticed that it was invalid. I've decided that as soon as just one person says to me, "This is no good, the license has expired," I'll throw it away. But no one has. Is there any wonder we have this mad frenzy of fraud?
KIDS TODAY
What bothers me a lot is, it used to be just the hardened criminal you had to worry about. Today it could be anyone. I'm not being politically correct, but I'm convinced that the main reason we have so much fraud today is because we live in an extremely unethical society. There's been a sharp slippage in ethics that has inspired a culture of fraud. And so what you're up against today is people who you'd consider trustworthy who have no ethics.
There are all these computer-savvy kids, many of whom are making twenty-dollar bills on their computers at home. They're scanning them in and printing them on their ink jet printers and taking them to the convenience store or the school cafeteria and spending them. This happens all the time because they think it's okay to do it.
We live in a society that doesn't teach ethics at home. We live in a society that doesn't teach ethics in school, because teachers would be accused of teaching morality. We live in a society where you can't even find a four-year college course on ethics, and if you could find one, they'd be talking about ethics three hundred years ago that have no relevance to ethics in the business world today.
I don't know anything that shows it better than Who's Who Among American High School Students. For more than thirty years, the organization has gone out and selected sixteen thousand high school students to be honored each year in their publication. In order to be accepted, a student had to have maintained a 4.0 average through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade. Once accepted, a student has to fill out a form and answer five questions. I've always been interested in question No. 3, and I've followed the results for twenty years, because they've changed dramatically. The question asks, During the last three years of high school, did you steal, cheat, lie, copy, or plagiarize? In the latest survey, more than 80