Elliot Castro was 16 years old and selling mobile phones in a call center in Glasgow, Scotland, when he first scammed someone out of their banking details.
The teenager soon began enjoying a lavish lifestyle that included first-class flights and luxury watches.
Castró ended up stealing £2.5 million (just over $3 million) in an audacious series of scams before he was finally caught in the bathroom of an Edinburgh department store.
The young man, who now works as a fraud prevention expert, shared his incredible story in a new BBC documentary titled “Confessions of a Teenage Swindler.”
Castro recounts his rapid rise since dropped out of high school with no grades until spending $1,000 on a bottle of champagne for friends at a New York bar.
Now 42 years old, the former fraudster remembers the first time he scammed a customer after taking a call with an order.
Instead of completing the transaction, Castro pretended there was a problem with the credit card and then proceeded to trick the customer into believing he had his bank on another phone line.
Seconds later he had the client’s bank details and his first scam was born.
“I don’t remember having a eureka moment, so to speak,” he recalled.
“It was more like something I did once and thought, ‘I wonder if I can keep doing this.’”
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The young man’s expenses were modest at first but, like his crimes, they increased rapidly.
“That was the beginning of five years of absolute madness from when I was 16 years old until I was 21, 22,” Castro told the radio program. Mornings from the BBC in Scotland.
“The first time I got the details of a card I spent money on CDs, haircuts and t-shirts.
“So I had no inkling of the madness I would live in later.”
A youth of travel and luxury
The fraudster was born in Aberdeen in 1982 and attended eight different schools before moving to Glasgow with his family in 1998.
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He describes himself as a dreamer and admitted to lying on the application for his call center job when he said he was 18 instead of 16.
“I had it in my head that I would have this incredible lifestyle,” said Castro, who is half Chilean.
His criminal career ended up financing exclusive vacations, five-star hotels, luxurious parties and limousines..
During a trip to London in 1999, Castro bought a Gucci belt for 300 pounds sterling (about $380), which he said was more than he earned in a week at the call center.
Later, the fan of the film “Home Alone” (also titled “Home Alone”) spent more than £8,000 (about $10,000) on a first-class flight to New York, where he stayed at the Plaza Hotel, that appears in the famous film.
Their trip included three days of spending £11,791 (about $15,000) on exclusive Fifth Avenue.
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Castro admitted: “A typical day for me at that time was to wake up, go shopping, go drinking, return to the hotel I was staying at that night, sleep, wake up the next day and repeat the same thing.”
“But all this time I was aware that I was possibly being followed or that someone was trying to catch me.”
In 2001 Castro made trips to Germany, France and Spain.
The following year he spent some time in Ireland, where he stayed at the Clarence Hotel in Dublin and, he says, rubbed shoulders with stars from the group U2.
“It’s a hotel owned by Bono and The Edge (U2 guitarist). “We had a conversation one night in the bar, where I told them I was working for the Ministry of Defense or as a hotel consultant.”
Clashes with the law
The fraudster had several brushes with the law, dating back to 2001, when he spent four months at a young offenders institute in Lancaster.
Months later he was arrested at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh and transferred to Manchester, where he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
During this time he got a job in the prison library and read about the internet.
After these readings, he began using Internet cafes when he was released to make anonymous flight reservations with stolen credit cards.
In 2002 Castro He was arrested in Toronto and imprisoned for 87 days before being deported in 2003..
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“I was starting to feel tired, I had started making friends for the first time in my life,” he said.
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“But he couldn’t tell them who he really was. The situation became unbearable.
“Now I wonder: was there a subconscious part of me that wanted to give up that way of life?”
One day Castro bought £2,000 (about US$2,500) in vouchers with a card that was not in his name.
The clerk called the card company, which approved the transaction. But, acting on a hunch, she called them again.
“The company contacted the real cardholder who verified that this was fraud and I stupidly returned to the store less than an hour later and that was the moment it all ended,” he explained.
“I went to the bathroom quickly and when I opened the stall door there was a plainclothes police officer and that was the beginning of the end.”
The following year, at a court in Isleworth in Middlesex, England, Castro admitted fraud offenses worth more than £73,000 (about $93,000) and was sentenced to two years in prison..
“Throughout those five years, if there had been better communication [entre agencias de policía y empresas de tarjetas de crédito] “Maybe they would have stopped me sooner,” he reflected.
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A new life
Today Castro He is a changed man, full of regret for the misery he caused and eager not to give the wrong idea that stealing is an attractive option..
It’s also helping stop sophisticated scams and catch credit card scammers.
“When I started doing this, I never thought about people,” he said.
“I never met those people I scammed. But that doesn’t mean that what I did was right.
“What I understood about credit cards at the time was that if the cardholder had not authorized the transactions – which in my case they did not – then they would not lose anything financially.”
More than 20 years later, Castro feels he is making amends for his youthful actions.
“I’m not making excuses, but what I did was a long, long time ago and I like to think I’ve made amends since then,” Castro said.
“Fortunately I am now in a position where I work with financial institutions, travel companies and businesses.
“I am fortunate to be known as a trusted advisor in the industry, which is fantastic.
“It has been an interesting journey.”