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Scots teen who stole £2.5m in ‘catch me if you can’ scam now working for cops

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Scots teen who stole £2.5m in ‘catch me if you can’ scam now working for cops

When international teenage fraudster Elliot Castro’s audacious life of crime came crashing down, he felt a strange sense of relief.

The young man who had nicked millions to fly first class around the world, stay in the best hotels, spend big in Beverly Hills and party with U2’s Bono had simply had enough. Prison was both a punishment and a blessing. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, Castro had passed himself off as a doctor, a naval officer and a secret service agent while stealing over £2.5million.




Today he is a different man, full of regret over the misery he caused, and working for police and law enforcement agencies around the globe to stop sophisticated fraud scams and catch credit card scammers just like himself.

Castro said: “When everything did come crashing down at the end, a part of me was relieved. I would never have admitted it at the time but, in retrospect, it really was the best thing that could have happened. Everything was getting out of control and I was at a point in my life where I was meeting people I liked and I could not be honest with them about what or who I was.

“I was trying to juggle all the lies I had concocted and the identities I had created while knowing the cops were on my back and I could get caught. I was mentally exhausted. What I was doing had become like an addiction – the rush and buzz I would get when I walked out of a bank after withdrawing thousands of pounds on a stolen credit card was insane – but it took its toll. When it got towards the end, I wasn’t enjoying it any more and it was turning into something I was despising about myself.”

Now 42, Castro, from Glasgow’s south side, features in new BBC Scotland documentary Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster. Even agreeing to doing the programme has been difficult as he is aware of how people may respond.

He said: “I’m excited and nervous and hope it is well received. It’s only been in the last seven or eight years that I have been able to forgive myself. I was very young and, although that doesn’t excuse what I got up to, I need to keep living. I’ve made my apologies and served my sentence.”

Elliot Castro in BBC documentary

While other 16-year-olds were using fake IDs to get into nightclubs, Castro was defrauding innocent cardholders from his call centre desk. During a five-year crime blitz the teen, from Battlefield, blew huge amounts of cash on other people’s credit cards.

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