Ironically, most of his stories were blowing smoke. He wasn't actually nearly as successful at any of that as he was at making up stories and convincing everyone how successful he had been at it. When dealing with a con artist, rule number one is believe nothing they say, certainly not about what they've done!
I have a suspicion some people might draw a distinction between financial crimes and exploiting children. I don't have a dataset for this at the moment but that is my suspicion.
Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.