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.
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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.