Inspired by the exploits of Frank Abagnale Jr - the 60s grifter who made the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list before his 21st birthday - "Catch Me If You Can" is the latest film to be inspired by a real-life confidence trickster.

The real trick, though, is getting your story filmed in the first place. Here are a few tips...

1 Break the Bank Between 1993 and 1995, city whiz-kid Nick Leeson lost over £850 million on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange. The catastrophic debts led to the collapse of the 200-year-old Barings Bank, which was eventually sold off for just £1. Leeson's luck didn't get any better. After three years in jail, his autobiography, "Rogue Trader", was filmed with Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel. Guess what? It lost money.

2 Drop a Name John Guare based his play "Six Degrees of Separation" on an article in the New York Times about a black youth who conned his way into the houses of the city's wealthy elite by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. Not only do we have this chancer to thank for the Oscar-nominated film that followed. He was also (partly) responsible for that endless source of movie-buff frustration, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

3 Rig a Lottery An unsuccessful attempt to rig the Pennsylvania state lottery in the 80s has inspired not one but two lame movies. In "The Squeeze" (1987), Michael Keaton stumbles upon a conspiracy to fix New York's lotto with magnetised ping-pong balls. Thirteen years later, in "Lucky Numbers", John Travolta was a weatherman who pulls the same scam. Not that you'd know it: Nora Ephron's so-called comedy has yet to be seen in the UK.

4 Take a Bung In 1919 the Chicago White Sox took bribes from gamblers to deliberately throw the World Series. It became baseball's most notorious scandal, and the players involved - branded the Black Sox - never played the game again. Well, they did, but only in John Sayles' 1988 dramatisation "Eight Men Out". Interestingly, one of the disgraced players, 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson, was rehabilitated a year later in "Field of Dreams".

5 Forge a Diary In 1983, Konrad Kujau was paid $500,000 by the Sunday Times after pretending he'd found 60 volumes of Hitler's diaries. They were fake, of course (one entry read, "Must get Olympic Games tickets for Eva"), and the forger was jailed for four-and-a-half years. In 1992 his story inspired Helmut Dietl's wacky satire "Schtonk!", one of Germany's biggest ever box office hits. Who said Germans have no sense of humour?

6 If in Doubt... Cheat! The discovery that NBC game show Twenty-One was rigged sent shockwaves through 50s America and turned its cheating champion, Charles Van Doren, from pin-up to pariah. When Robert Redford recreated the scandal in "Quiz Show", the film's star Ralph Fiennes indulged in some duplicity of his own. In order to get Van Doren's voice right, he drove over to his house and, pretending to be a lost motorist, asked for directions.

"Catch Me If You Can" opens in UK cinemas on Friday 31st January 2003.