Catch Me If You Can is the Social Engineeer’s Playbook

When most people hear the term hacker, they think of a technically adept loner who'd rather pull apart binaries and analyze malware than talk to another human being. But the reality is that a lot of what hackers actually do is just social engineering in one form or another.

Telling people what they want to hear and convincing them to do something they suspect is wrong is at the heart of the social engineer's playbook, and it's those two things that drive the action in Steven Spielberg's classic Catch Me If You Can. Leonardo DiCaprio plays real-life con man Frank Abagnale Jr. as an aimless young charisma machine who discovers early on the secret that all successful con men know: People want to believe what you tell them.

Bestselling author Shea Serrano joins Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O’Donnell-Welch to explore why Catch Me If You Can is more than a con-artist story: it’s a hacker classic and master class in social engineering, confidence, and deception. We unpack DiCaprio’s performance, Spielberg’s tension-building, and the film’s memorable cast and scenes. Along the way, the conversation connects the movie to hacker culture and cybersecurity, and asks why Frank Abagnale’s cons still fascinate us today.