The best service a financial advisor can provide his or her client is ethics and honesty. Sounds obvious, if not prosaic. But perhaps the advice takes on new meaning depending on how it's delivered and who's delivering it.

Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a keynote speaker at the Financial Planning Association's annual conference that began Thursday, kicked off the event with words of advice about ethics. Abagnale knows a thing or two about ethics--or a lack thereof. Check forging, impersonating people and scamming others came easy to Abagnale at an early age.

Abagnale, 63, is the real life confidence man whose life has been the subject of a Hollywood feature film Catch Me If You Can, directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Broadway musical of the same name that just closed Sept. 4. He told his life story during the conference's general session before an estimated 400 attendees. He now makes his living as a security and financial fraud consultant.

"In your job, the best thing that you can give to your clients, and what should be the most important part of your life is to bring them ethics--good ethical behavior," Abagnale said. "Bring them great character in your job, so that they can trust you in your job without question. Always treat them as you would wanted to be treated yourself.

"That's what this industry needs more than ever," Abagnale continued. "It's for people to just be honest and act in an ethical way when your are dealing with other people's money, and essentially their whole life."

When asked about the rampant rise in white collar crime in corporate America, especially over the past two decades, Abagnale cited two factors: lack of ethics and a double-standard in punishing white collar criminals.

"We're dealing with white collar crime now at $950 billion a year," Abagnale said. "That figure has nothing to do with burglary, robbery, sex, property or drugs. It is strictly white collar crime."

"The fact is, we live in an extremely unethical society," Abagnale said. "We live in a society where we don't teach ethics at home, and we don't teach ethics in school because the teacher would be accused of teaching morality."

He adds that white-collar crime is only going to get bigger, and easier to commit. "I have never seen such an increase in company embezzlement has I have seen in the last few years," he said.

"White-collar crime is only going to get easier, faster, and harder to detect," Abagnale said. "What I did 40 years ago is 4,000 times easier to do today."

The solution, he said, is to bring ethics and character back into everyday life.

"Certainly, it has to be brought back into the home, back into the schools and certainly back into the university and certainly back into the workplace," Abagnale said. "Instilling character and ethics is an everyday job."

Abagnale says the second element needed to help squelch white-collar crime is tougher punishment for the perpetrator.

"It's amazing how we look at some kinds of crimes and how we strongly punish them, Abagnale said. "Yet people can steal millions upon millions of dollars, and we can think nothing of it, because we say 'well, they didn't hurt anybody.' But they tremendously hurt someone.''

Abagnale said white-collar criminals should be meted out more severe punishment. "Those crimes should be punished more; there should be much stiffer sentences," he said. ??Abagnale said he receives hundreds of e-mails from strangers, many who are astounded by his ingenuity in his life of crime. ??"But I've always looked on what I did as something immoral, unethical and a burden that I live with every day of my life, and will to my death, " Abagnale told the audience

When he was 16, a family court judge told Abagnale he needed to choose between living with his father or his mother, who were getting divorced. He chose neither, but ran away to live on his own where he eventually honed his skills of forgery, embezzlement and impersonation.

In the 1960s, Abagnale passed $2.5 million worth of meticulously forged checks across 26 countries over the course of five years. In the process, he claimed to have assumed no fewer than eight separate identities, impersonating an airline pilot, a doctor, a Bureau of Prisons agent, and a lawyer. He escaped from police custody twice (once from a taxiing airliner and once from a U.S. federal penitentiary), before he was 21 years old.

During the past 36 years Abagnale has served as a security consultant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and wrote five books on fraud, identity theft and corporate white-collar crime. He also runs Abagnale & Associates, a financial fraud consultancy company. He has since married, and with his wife raised three boys, one whom is now an FBI agent.

--Jim McConville