Bangalore, Jan. 21: Leonardo DiCaprio did it on screen. Prateek Mathur too tried to repeat his catch-me-if-you-can act for the umpteenth time but got caught.

His 'catch' got suspicious.

Bangalore police yesterday picked up Mathur after a young lady, whom the 28-year-old bachelor from Mumbai appears to have befriended, doubted his rather tall claims about being an American Airlines pilot who doubled as a CIA agent and called the cops.

The lady's identity cannot be revealed but a check on Mathur's laptop revealed a host of intimate pictures of the alleged conman with at least 10 other women. The police said they could be his earlier victims as he went about playing a glib-talking, computer-savvy Casanova.

'This man went about befriending women by peddling lies and fraudulently accessed their email accounts,' DCP (crime) Abhishek Goyal told The Telegraph today.

The police said Mathur confessed that he used keylogger malwares - hard-to-detect software programmes that register every keystroke made on keypads of infected machines - to hack and steal email passwords of his victims.

Mathur's real-life escapades mirror that of Frank Abagnale Jr., the 1948-born former American conman, whose life story provided the inspiration for the Hollywood film Catch Me if You Can.

DiCaprio played Abagnale in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie.

The real Abagnale, who came from a broken home, travelled free, flying Pan Am flights on a forged pilot's licence, printed and encashed fake cheques, impersonated a medical doctor and landed a job as a lawyer by forging a law transcript before the FBI netted him.

Although Mathur didn't say he had been inspired by Abagnale's confidence tricks, he lied to his interrogators that he was a lawyer practising at Bombay High Court.

Bangalore police have booked Mathur on the charges of cheating, impersonation and forgery and also under sections of the information technology act related to the use of dishonest means to secure personal details of others.

Investigators are now tracing Mathur's footprints to examine his mode of operation and how he managed to con so many women. Sources said Mathur even spoofed emails, purportedly from the American intelligence agency, to impress his victims that he was a British national on a 'top-secret' CIA mission in India.

The police are now trying to figure out how long had Mathur, who introduced himself as a pilot named Robin to the Bangalore lady, been conning women by giving the impression that he was a CIA agent.

Although preliminary evidence suggests that he had taken at least 10 women for a ride, DCP Goyal wasn't sure how many would volunteer to help in the investigation. 'I don't know how many of them would be as brave as the complainant (from Bangalore) to come forward,' he said.

It was not also immediately clear whether the investigators would question Mathur's earlier victims. But something seems clear: Mathur's con-run parallel with Abagnale may have, for all practical purposes, ended.

While the FBI subsequently hired Abagnale to teach it his self-taught tricks to identify false cheques, it's unlikely India's police would one day ask Mathur to help them out.