SCOTLAND’S most audacious teenage scammer became such an adept con artist he could persuade credit card firms to give him fraudulent plastic in his own name.
Elliot “Fiddle” Castro came up with the ploy in a bid to maintain a lavish lifestyle funded by thousands of card details he nicked during an astonishing crime spree.
It is just one of many jaw-dropping confessions Castro, of Glasgow, makes in a warts-and-all documentary about becoming a globetrotting rip-off merchant by 18.
And at 20, he’d spent more than £1million conned from innocent people and was wanted by cops at home and abroad.
Castro, now 41, recounts his astonishing years as an elusive kid conman in the BBC’s Confessions Of A Teenage Fraudster.
He says: “By aged 20, I’d spent well over a million pounds of other people’s money all over the world. Once you’ve had a taste of something nice it’s very hard to go back. You don’t do all of that without getting banged up now and then.
“But no level of guilt or length of sentence had ever persuaded me to stop.”
Castro, who was born in Aberdeen, first got involved in crime after landing a job at a call centre selling mobile phones.
Aged 16, he pretended he was 18, meaning he was put in a role that gave him access to personal details from customers.
He eventually got sacked but left having harvested enough sensitive data to start getting lenders to send credit cards to his home.
He said: “Other 16-year-olds were trying to get into a nightclub on fake IDs, while I was cheating innocent card holders out of their own money.
“And I wasn’t bad at spending it either. I lived a life you could only dream of.
“The best hotels, the finest restaurants, first class as standard and none of it paid for from my own pocket.
“I’d love to tell you I got away with it all but for every night I enjoyed in a five-star hotel I endured many more behind bars.”
Castro once spent a whopping £11,000 in a three-day spending spree.
And as his scams mounted up he found himself being drawn into bizarre scenarios.
Once, after nicking a medic’s details, he was on a train and paid for his ticket with a card that marked him out as a doctor.
But when unexpectedly a call came over the Tannoy looking for medical help, Castro was in trouble.
He recalled: “The train inspector remembered the card was in the name of a doctor.”
Moments later Castro, still just a teen, found himself helping a stricken woman with two other medics rather than tell the truth.
He said: “She took me through the buffet car where there was another passenger and two other doctors.
“Now I had not got a proper idea of what was going on with this lady but I thought it looked like a panic attack — in my “expert medical opinion”.
“And fortunately the other two doctors agreed with my medical diagnosis.”
During his criminal days he once even posed as an officer from the serious fraud squad to contact credit card firms in an effort to find out his “wanted level”.
He said: “I asked to be put through to their fraud departments, and explained that I was calling from the Serious Fraud Office.
“One by one, they all said the same thing.”
He adds: “I had the Irish and UK police after me, along with one of the world’s largest travel retailers. Now I could add the biggest credit card companies to that list.”
He moved to Belfast and switched from credit card scams to a ruse where he’d get hard cash wired to him.
It sparked a period of chaotic spending that included buying a BMW worth £50,000, shopping trips to Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and a £10,000 casino splurge in Monte Carlo.
But as he struggled to cope with the guilt of living a lie, he became sloppy.
He said: “The thrill had gone. I was spending and partying on autopilot.”
He was eventually snared after a shop assistant became suspicious when he bought £2,000 of gift vouchers from Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh.
And in 2005 he was sentenced to two years in an open prison aged 21.
Castro said: “Things could have gone one of two ways for me but the last time I came out of prison I decided I would never go back.”
Owen Miller fraud investigations manager at Expedia, said: “In my time at Expedia I investigated somewhere around 1,000 total individual cases and Elliot is in the top five — if not the top.”
The reformed con, who now produces music and advises on fraud prevention, felt now was the right time to speak out.
He said: “One of the best things to come out of this is that over the last ten years or so I’ve had the opportunity to give advice to other young people who have gotten in touch having heard my story.”
Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster airs on BBC Scotland at 10pm on Tuesday.
