Things you should not post on Facebook

Frank Abagnale, the man dubbed the world's greatest conman, has issued a stark warning about the dangers of identity theft and children using Facebook, the Guardian reports.

Abagnale, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg's film Catch Me If You Can, said that children in particular need to be made aware of the serious risks of unwittingly revealing information on social networking sites.

He has nearly 40 years experience as a security expert for US law enforcement agencies, having switched sides when he was eventually caught by the FBI after spending half his teenage years on the run as a confidence trickster, imposter, cheque forger and escape artist in the 1960s.

He said having accrued 37 years' work with the FBI he has also become aware of many widely available techniques to gather dangerous amounts of personal data from Facebook.

- If you tell me your date of birth and where you're born [on Facebook] I'm 98% [of the way] to stealing your identity - he said.

He also advised Facebook users to never choose a passport-style photograph as a profile picture, and instead use group photographs.

- Every time you say you 'like' or 'don't like' you are telling someone [things like] your sexual orientation, ethnic background, voting record - he warned.

Between the ages of 16 and 21 Abagnale claims to have impersonated airline pilots, a doctor and a lawyer while forging and cashing $2.5m in cheques and employing other confidence scams. However, he has admitted in the past that his co-writer on the book Catch Me If You Can, on which the DiCaprio film was based, "over dramatised and exaggerated" some of his exploits.

He said that counter-intuitively the rise of technology has made it harder, not easier, for law enforcement. "What I did 40 years ago as a teenage boy is 4,000 times easier now," he said. "Technology breeds crime."