The life and crimes of an artful dodger

Elliot Castro, resplendent in a bright red Che Guevara t-shirt, takes in the view from his suite in a dockside Dublin hotel overlooking the boats moored on the Liffey.

“I stayed in this exact same room once,” he says.
Legitimately?
“No.”
With a name like that, Mr Castro was destined for an (in)auspicious career. At an age when the rest of us were going to school discos and summoning the courage to buy our first three-pack of condoms, Elliot was perfecting his skills as a professional fraudster. Throughout his late teens and early 20s, this working class Scottish kid perpetrated countless credit card and bank scams and used the money to fund the life of a high roller, taking first class plane trips around the world, staying in plush hotels and spending a fortune (seven figures at last reckoning) on champagne and designer clobber. He was apprehended on numerous occasions and did jail time in Ireland, the UK and Canada, but now, at the grand old age of 25, he’s gone straight and is in Dublin promoting his memoir Other People’s Money: The Rise And Fall Of Britain’s Most Audacious Fraudster, co-written with Maxim journalist Neil Forsyth.
“I really like this city actually,” he says, “it’s the first time I’ve been here since I got out of prison. There’s quite a lot of nice hotels in Dublin, and I’ve stayed in just about all of them at one point or another. It’s a pity: if I hadn’t fucked up in Dublin, I probably would’ve thought about moving here permanently.”
In person, Castro is unfailingly polite, apologises for swearing, and generally comports himself like a decent bloke. Should some enterprising director (say, Danny Boyle) ever film his life story as the Scottish equivalent of Catch Me If You Can, the lead role might be played by Danny Dyer doing his best soft-spoken, self-deprecating but razor sharp wideboy.
In his book, Castro comes across as a bright but bored kid who formulated, developed and refined a very specialised set of scamming skills with no training or teaching. Had he been from a more privileged background, had he not repeatedly slipped through the cracks in the educational system, he might have become a promoter (he harbours ambitions to be a club DJ) or even a stock market player.
“They thought I had Asperger’s Syndrome at one point,” he says. “These psychiatrists would ask me the same question every time I went to see them, my answers didn’t change, and then they’d say that they still didn’t know what was wrong with me. Over the past three or four years I’ve thought a lot about how things could have been different. Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I was doing, I don’t deny that at all, but I often think, had I something else to put myself into, you and I probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking now.
“But it’s getting more difficult to regret it to be honest. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but what I regret is not taking from the banks, what I regret is Mr and Mrs Smith opening their credit card statements and nearly having a heart attack, going, ‘Oh my god, who’s been to Australia on my card?!!’ So, genuinely, I’m sorry about that Mr and Mrs Smith. I’m sorry about what I did to my family. I think I could have made something out of myself, even if I hadn’t done this. I’ll never say I didn’t have a brilliant time, because that would be bigger than any lie I told before, but the worst thing about it for me, apart from the jail time obviously, was I couldn’t tell people who I was, even if I really liked them. Actually having a relationship would’ve been absolutely impossible.”
So what compelled him to repeatedly perpetrate these scams? Did he have some sort of spending addiction?
“It wasn’t there at first, definitely not. When I think about the things I was using the cards to buy when I first started doing it, it certainly wasn’t first class flights and expensive Armani suits, it was just CDs, music and stuff. But as time went on, I started to get a lot more confident and to be able to walk into places like this and say, ‘Hi, I’m checking into the presidential suite tonight’. Honestly, fuck knows how I got away with a lot of it. How did these people believe me? I mean, I must have been really good at bullshitting. I just got into a mode. I was absolutely meant to be there, was supposed to be in that shop, that was my card, I was supposed to be buying that suit. It was my money that was paying for it. I put on this whole persona… it just went a bit too far.”
Does Elliot now get headhunted by credit card companies and banks to brief their security divisions on how their systems can be breached?
“Well, that’s the reason I’m in Dublin. I’m speaking at a conference tomorrow. I’ve been asked not to say anything about it because the company that’s organising the conference don’t want the press involved. I’m hoping to get something a bit more permanent out of it, because conference work pays pretty well, and I’m not gonna get this kind of money doing something else for a day. I reckon I’ve got the skills to try and help the banks, but I’m not sure I’d be offered a permanent position to be honest, because of how the public would perceive banks employing a fraudster.”
So what measures can people take to prevent their becoming the victims of a credit card or PIN scam?
“There’s a few simple rules. Number one, if you’re called by someone on the phone who claims to be your bank, don’t just take their word for it, make sure it is your bank. Either ask them to give you some information only they would know, or call them back. Me, I would just call them back anyway, no matter what they could tell me about myself. People now have a lot more information in the public domain than they might have had ten years ago.
“Secondly, have a good look at your accounts, check the balance once a week. I check my bank account online every single day. It’s so easy if you have the internet at home just to log in and make sure everything’s fine, and if you see something that’s not right, give the bank a call and check it out. Don’t panic; if something has gone wrong, nine times out of ten it’ll be fixed and you won’t lose anything financially. But if you keep an eye on your accounts, you’re not giving the fraudster that chance where they can have weeks on end of using your account.”
To be honest, it’s hard to dislike Elliot Castro. Although given to petty thievery, his worst crimes were principally committed against banks and credit card corporations. And without getting tangled up in moral relativism, moneylenders were held in absolute contempt in Biblical times. Like Bob said: steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.
“I’ve got my own bank account these days and I have been subject to charges and thought to myself, ‘That’s not particularly fair!’” he chuckles. “One of my friends actually phoned me a couple of weeks ago and said his bank had charged him something like £35 for being eleven pence overdrawn and having the honour of having a letter sent out to him to tell him so.”

Other People’s Money: The Rise And Fall Of Britain’s Most Audacious Fraudster is published by Sidgwick & Jackson.