In response to such impersonations, and with heightened security thanks to hijackings starting in the 70’s, it has been tougher and tougher to get away with this sort of thing. Abignale was lucky to be doing his thing at just the right time. At the time, a pilot was a hugely prestigious job, air travel was pretty expensive and rare and international travel, even more so. Cheque cashing took a long time so someone could cash a cheque and be long gone before the fraud was discovered. (Heck, there’s a similar internet purchase “send me the change from this certified cheque” fraud that was going around recently).
All the controls over airports in the last few decades have combined to make it pretty much impossible to “fake your way” in. The airport ID cards I’ve seen have bar codes and probably microchips, because they are waved or swiped to open locked doors - also (I assume) meaning they are validated in real time against a central computer system. I suppose you could fake one, but the first time it was scanned, it would trigger alarms. I haven’t looked closely, but would be surprised if they didn’t have the same holographic and UV security features as drivers’ licenses.
Printing was a rare and complicated business, so something that looked professional and printed appeared genuine. (There’s a scene in the movie where he’s faking a Pan-Am payroll cheque by using the decals for a model airplane as company logos on the cheques.) In this day where home colour laser printers and photo printers are cheap, we forget how recently laser-print quality required expensive equipment and a lot of processing. So Frank’s scams cashing cheques are harder to do today. In those days credit cards were pretty much non-existent, so things were done with cash. With all the problems cheques bring, I see more and more businesses today don’t bother accepting cheques except from established customers. His scam of cashing massive numbers of cheques in Europe (and across the USA) also benefited from the fact that long distance was painfully expensive and even extremely difficult from some foreign countries, so validating cheques by phone was not routine.
Similarly - a number of factors have come together to make faking being a doctor (or anything) a more difficult proposition. Records generally are online. Even the most rural facility can hook into internet connections to be part of various networks. The problems with drugs have made controls on prescriptions more strict; most state medical bodies have authorizations online. If caught nowadays, the un-doctor would immediately face far more serious felony drug charges for fake prescriptions, in addition to practicing without a license - unless they never wrote a prescription. Not to mention sexual assault charges if he did clothing-optional exams.
There was a discussion here earlier about faking being a lawyer, the general conclusion being most states track lawyers accredited to the bar, and unless you could steal the identity of an accredited lawyer, faking your way in was almost impossible; and in a small professional community, it’s likely you would run across someone who knew the real person.
I suppose being isolated in a rural community and medicine having less interaction, it might be easier to get away with. For things like Medicare. likely there’s a registration process and the fake doctor 9a) is more likely to be found out and (b) billing Medicare without accreditation is a fraud felony. However, modern medicine’s modus operandi is that a patient needing more involved treatment is referred to a specialist by a doctor - presumably a doctor making too many errors would attract the attention of the nearest community of specialists, and eventually bring on investigations from the medical board.
OTOH if you want to dress up as a doctor and wander the hospital - nowadays, thanks to problems like this, ID cards are pretty much mandatory, doors are locked and require keycard access, etc.
(I recall a news item about a some rural Nova Scotia town who lost their not-a-doctor. The fellow got away with it for several years, with some elementary knowledge, medical textbooks, and ordering far too many tests.)
In the movie “Parker” real estate agent Jennifer Lopez mentions to Jason Statham that she figured out his false identity - his credit record only began 6 months earlier. Former soviet spy “Jack Barsky” even 40 years ago used the excuse that he had been working on a farm to excuse getting an SSN in his late 20’s because it seemed suspicious. Nowadays, your identity is a compendium of your paper trail of past activity from birth, school, college, drivers’ license history, credit history, IRS tax records, etc. Faking a full-fledged, relatively correct identity is almost impossible unless you are the CIA and have government access to many record sources. Stealing an identity has its own risks and difficulties.
So in general, things are much more locked down and secured than they used to be. We can thank everything from terrorism to petty theft to drugs for the prevalence of security, and computers for making it much harder to fake your way in. the fifties and early sixties were a magical time for fakes and cons, as long as you were white, male and educated. Things are much harder today.
