The teenage conman financing a £2.5 million worldwide fraud spree

He soon found himself living the life of luxury, complete with first-class travel and high-end timepieces.
The adolescent was eventually caught in an Edinburgh department store restroom after planning and executing a daring sequence of frauds that resulted in the loss of £2.5 million.
Castro's incredible tale was included in the recently released BBC Scotland program, Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster. Castro is currently employed as a fraud prevention specialist.

It follows his meteoric climb from dropping out of school with no qualifications to buying a bottle of champagne for friends in a New York club for $1,000 (£786).

Castro, who is now forty-two, remembers his first fake customer who called in with an order.
Rather than processing the order as usual, he first said there was an issue with the credit card before tricking them into believing he was speaking with their bank.
Soon after obtaining their details, a scam emerged.

He remembered: "I don't remember having that Eureka moment, if you like."I merely thought, "I wonder if I can do this," after completing it once.

Like his crimes, Castro's expenditures started out little but quickly increased.
"That was the beginning of five years of absolute craziness from the time I was 16 up until 21, 22," he said on BBC Radio Scotland's Mornings show.I used to get cards for CDs, t-shirts, and haircuts the first time I ever held one.

"There was no hint of how mental it would get later on."
The con artist was born in Aberdeen in 1982, and before relocating to Glasgow with his family in 1998, he attended eight different schools.

In addition to calling himself a dreamer, he acknowledged lying on his contact center employment application by claiming to be 18 years old rather than 16.
Castro stated, "I had it in my head that I would just have this amazing lifestyle." Castro is partly Chilean.
Eventually, his illegal activity funded opulent parties, five-star hotels, special vacations, and limos.

Castro claimed that the £300 he paid for a Gucci belt during one trip to London in 1999 was more than he made in a single call center week.

The admirer of Home Alone then lavished over £8,000 on a first-class ticket to New York, staying at the Plaza Hotel—a prominent location in the well-known film.
During his trip, he went on a $15,000 (£11,791) spending binge over three days on the upscale Fifth Avenue in the metropolis.

According to Castro: "A general day in my life at that time was wake-up, go shopping, buy things, go drinking, go back to whatever hotel I was staying in that night, sleep, wake up the next day and repeat."But throughout it all, I had to be conscious of the possibility that I was being followed or that someone was trying to find me."

He had fun traveling to Germany, France, and Spain in 2001.
He traveled to Ireland the next year, staying at Dublin's The Clarence Hotel and claiming to have crossed paths with U2 members.
Castro stated: "It's a hotel owned by Bono and the Edge and we had a conversation one night in the bar where I told them I was working for the Ministry of Defence or a hotel consultant."

The scammer had multiple run-ins with the authorities, beginning in 2001 when he was incarcerated for four months at a Lancaster juvenile offenders' institute.
A few months later, he was apprehended at Edinburgh's Balmoral Hotel and transported to Manchester, where he was given an 18-month sentence to serve at HMP Hindley.
He studied up on the internet and acquired a job in the jail library during this period.

After conducting this investigation, he used internet cafés to book anonymous flights using credit cards that had been stolen.
He was taken into custody in Toronto in 2002 and held there for 87 days before his deportation in 2003.

The next year, in Edinburgh's Harvey Nichols department store, his global criminal spree finally came to an end.
Castro stated: "I was beginning to feel done with it, I'd started for the first time in my life to make friends."The drawback was that I was unable to reveal my true identity to them.

"The situation became unbearable."Therefore, I do wonder whether there was a part of me that secretly desired to give it up."
On that day, he used a credit card that wasn't his to purchase £2,000 worth of vouchers.

The transaction was approved by the card company after the receptionist called them.
On a hunch, though, she gave them another call.
"It ended when I foolishly returned to the shop less than an hour after they contacted the actual cardholder and confirmed it was fraudulent," he stated.

"I went to the toilet quickly and when I opened the cubicle door there was a plain clothes police officer there and that was the beginning of the end."
Castro was given a two-year sentence after admitting to fraud crimes totaling more than £73,000 at Isleworth Crown Court in Middlesex the following year.
Fraud involving getty cardsGetty

Castro acknowledges that he profited from the card companies' and law enforcement agencies' lack of cooperation.
He stated: "Through the five years, if they'd had better communication then they might have managed to stop me quicker."

He is a different man now, regretting the suffering he brought on and careful not to romanticize thievery.
In addition, he assists in apprehending credit card thieves and putting an end to complex scams.
Castro stated: "I never really gave people a thought when I first started doing this.

"These are folks I've never met. That does not render it appropriate.At the time, I thought that credit cardholders would not experience any financial loss if they had not authorized the transactions, which they in my instance had not done."

He believes he is atoning for his acts as a young man and teenager more than 20 years later.
He stated: "I'm not making excuses, but it is a very, very long time ago and I like to think since then I've made reparations."Thankfully, I'm currently employed by banking institutions, travel agencies, and other firms.

"I'm fortunate and lucky to be known as a trusted advisor in the industry now, which is great."The trip has been interesting.