True Crime: Glasgow’s teenage con artist

National World - LocalTV

We revisited the store of Elliot Castro, a Glaswegian who began fraudulently obtaining credit at the age of 16 while working at a call centre, stealing more than £2 million before being sent to prison and turning his life around. Here’s a summary of our investigation.

Transcript

00:00You could argue he was probably, at the time, one of the most wanted men in the world, yet

00:04he was this guy in the south side of Glasgow. In terms of Glasgow crime, this is highly

00:10unusual and probably on a scale never seen before. And it gave him a fantastic lifestyle,

00:16which eventually caught up with him.

00:17Get the big deep breath in and do it.

00:22What do you want to know?

00:23There's certainly no shortage of crime in Glasgow. The city is widely recognised for

00:28its violent tendencies. It was once even named the murder capital of Europe. Crime

00:32in Glasgow generally alludes to very physical, emotionally driven actions. This is what makes

00:38the case of Elliot Castro so shocking. A person considered one of the most prolific fraudsters

00:44the UK has ever seen, due to a series of crimes he began committing when he was just a teenager.

00:49I mean, it's a very unusual case. It's a young man from Battlefield in the south side

01:01of Glasgow, had quite an unusual sort of checkered upbringing and suddenly found himself working

01:10in a call centre in Glasgow and saw the opportunity to create some bogus identities

01:19using the information that was coming into the call centre.

01:22Elliot Castro had an ordinary upbringing in Glasgow's south side. He had nice, normal

01:27parents and lived in a safe community. Yet he is the perpetrator of a number of fraudulent

01:32acts that gripped Britain in the early 2000s. Born in 1982 in Aberdeen to a Scottish mother

01:38and Chilean father, he grew up in the Battlefield area of Glasgow. Elliot left school at 16

01:44years old with no qualifications, but managed to secure a job in a local call centre selling

01:50mobile phones. He claimed to be 18 to get his foot in the door.

01:54Now keep in mind that at this time the concept of credit payments and the nature of these

01:58transactions was still relatively new and so there wasn't the safeguards in place that

02:03we have today, such as voice recognition and recorded calls.

02:07Elliot soon realised that the job put him in a position of power. The customers on the

02:11other end of the call trusted him with their personal information. They willingly handed

02:16it over without doubting his authority. At one point he began recording these details

02:21in a notebook. He would even use psychological tactics to

02:24retrieve extra information from them, mimicking their accent and tone to increase his trustability.

02:30He would say stuff like, there's a slight issue with the bank, they've asked me to collect

02:33some extra information. And then the recipient would usually respond with enthusiasm, unquestioning.

02:40What he then did was call the credit card companies pretending to be the account holders,

02:45change the address to his own in Glasgow, say he'd lost the card and ask if they could

02:49send out a new one. Once he'd received it he would call and change the address back

02:54to avoid suspicion. These were the days before chip and pin so when he spent, all he'd have

02:58to do was swipe and then mimic a signature. At first all he was buying was CDs and then

03:04by his own words he developed an addiction to getting away with it. He tested the boundary

03:08more and the spending became much more extravagant.

03:11He was working as a teenager in a position of trust. He was working in a call centre

03:16as many people do across the UK. And instead of putting the transaction through in the

03:22way that he was supposed to, he put it through in a different way. He found a kind of crack

03:28in the system, didn't immediately get found out and then things escalated fast. This became

03:34a fraud on an industrial scale.

03:38Elliot scammed over £2 million in credit through fraudulent tactics over a period of

03:43just a few years. He used this money to travel the world and buy designer goods. He pretended

03:48to be people that he wasn't and partied with celebrities. And eventually in 2005 after

03:53an international investigation he was arrested for the final time and given a two year sentence.

03:59Upon release he was hired by some major banks and even the FBI as a fraud consultant and

04:05now helps prevent scams. He still lives in the south side of Glasgow today and DJs around

04:10the city's clubs.

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