I was a teenage con artist - revisiting the case of the Glasgow scammer who spent millions

Elliot Castro remains notorious for his involvement in large-scale credit card fraud which he used to fund an extravagant lifestyle. His criminal activities gained attention due to the scale of the fraud and the fact that he managed to manipulate financial systems to steal millions of pounds. A true crime documentary from Shots TV puts the spotlight on the famous case of the teenager who embarked on a crime spree, committing fraud at an industrial scale.

The documentary sets the scene: “You could argue he was one of the most wanted men in the world, yet he was this guy in the southside of Glasgow. In terms of Glasgow crime, this is highly unusual and probably on a scale never seen before, up close and personal fraud. He seemed to always have a gift for scamming the system. It gave him a fantastic lifestyle, which eventually caught up with him.”

Watch now on Shots! TV: True Crime: Revisited: One of the world’s most prolific fraudsters or tune in on Saturday 19th April on Freeview channel 262 and Freely 565 at 6pm.

Castro remains one of the most prolific fraudsters the UK has ever seen due to a series of crimes he began committing when he was just a teenager: “It's a very unusual case. It's a young man from Battlefield in the southside of Glasgow, quite unusual chequered upbringing, and he suddenly found himself working in a call centre in Glasgow and saw the opportunity to create some sort of bogus identities using the information that was coming into the call centre.”

Born in 1982 in Aberdeen to a Scottish mother and Chilian father, Castro grew up in Glasgow. He left school at 16 years old with no qualifications, but managed to secure a job in a local call centre selling mobile phones. He claimed to be 18 to get his foot in the door: “Now keep in mind that at this time the concept of credit payments and the nature of these transactions was still relatively new, and so there wasn't the safeguards in place that we have today, such as voice recognition and recorded calls. Elliot soon realised that the job put him in a position of power.”

“The customers on the other end of the call trusted him with their personal information. They willingly handed it over without doubting his authority. At one point, he began recording these details in a notebook. He would even use psychological tactics to retrieve extra information from them, mimicking their accent and tone to increase his trustability. He would say stuff like, there's a slight issue with the bank. They've asked me to collect some extra information, and then the recipient would usually respond with enthusiasm unquestioning.

“What he then did was call the credit card companies pretending to be the account holders, change the address to his own in Glasgow. Say he'd lost the card and ask if they could send out a new one. Once he'd received it, he would call and change the address back to avoid suspicion. These were the days before shipping pen, so when he spent, all he'd have to do was swipe and then mimic a signature. At first all he was buying with CDs and then by his own words, he developed an addiction to getting away with it.” His crimes became more extravagant.

Shots! is your home of True Crime, UK Crime Caught on Camera and Weird and Wonderful TV. Find us on Freeview channel 262 and Freely 565 as well as on demand at www.shotstv.com