Carding: How I Stole $2.8 Million As A Teenager

[Jollier]

I was a scammer for about five years. I must have made thousands of transactions in that period. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, especially at that age. Like a lot of teenagers, I thought I knew it all. I did some terrible things.

I’m Elliot Castrom, I’m 36 years old. I’m from Glaxo, and when I was a teenager I spent about £2.5m of other people’s money. The first time I got into anything scammy was by accident. I found a credit card on a train and thought there was something I could do with it. So I used it to pay for my train ticket to school to save money and buy sweets. But the police came on the train and I got caught. When I left school I was 16 and I applied to a mobile phone company.

I said I was 18. I got the job, people were calling and buying things with their credit cards. I thought maybe there was a way I could use this information? Maybe call the bank and pretend to be the cardholder? Send a new card to the address provided and they would send me the card and the PIN? It really hit me in perspective once I got a better understanding of it. I was literally going crazy.

I was punching cards while traveling all over the world. At one point I had been to almost every country in Europe, the Far East, the States, South America. The best hotels, first class flights, the nightlife. When I arrived at the airport I wanted an expensive car to meet me. When I was hungry I went to the best restaurants. When you are that young you don’t really have any friends. You want to please people and when you think money rules and gets attention, that’s what you need.

The most I spent in one night at a nightclub was probably about 15 grand. Basically, almost everything I bought was top of the line. That’s when things really started to get tough. Standard class train fares turned into first class train fares, including Tony and Guy haircuts and all that. I went into a jewellery shop in Edinburgh one day.

They had a Rolex watch I wanted. I went in, told the man I was buying it for one of the directors of our company. I walked out and literally started jumping up and down in the street. I bought the watch for fourteen and a half grand. It was probably the biggest thrill I've ever had. I never thought I'd get caught. I literally never thought it would end. It all went wrong when I got greedy and careless, as these stories often end.

I bought a BMW 7 series. It was like 50 grand. I didn’t have a license, I couldn’t drive. It was just to show off in front of people. I went to the BMW garage and ordered a car straight away. I went to the toilet and when I opened the stall door to get out, there was a guy standing right in front of me. He grabbed my arm and said, “I have a few words for you.” I had a wallet full of credit cards in different names.

I had no way of getting them out. The worst experience I had was in Canada. I ended up going to jail there for a while. It was the worst place I’ve ever been in my life. I spent the first week there in tears, it was bloody awful. It was really, really bad. People were getting stabbed on a regular basis. It was just crazy. I called Immigration Canada and said I was from the British Embassy.

And the guy from the immigration department said, “Oh, yes, Mr Castro, he’s being deported on Monday.” And we were asked to tell the detective at Gateway, at Scotland Yard, when he was leaving. The embassy will take care of it for you. And I just said, oh, that’s great, thank you very much, that’ll save me a lot of work. So when I came back, interestingly, there was nobody waiting for me. But when I came back, I had no money, I had nothing.

They confiscated all the money I had on me. Then I found out that they had given me back the plane ticket that they had booked, along with all the details of the credit card that they had used. So I booked my own ticket on the Canadian immigration card back to Laskovo. They were actually chasing me around the world. I thought, I can’t believe this, I’ve managed to escape again.

I went to court in Manchester, talked myself out of a conviction there. I went downstairs to get my stuff and there were two more cops waiting to take me to London this time. Then when I got to London, there was a detective from Scotland Yard waiting for me who had been stalking me for about three years. When he met me, he was actually happy to meet me. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever had in my life. I ended up getting a two-year sentence, which, considering what I did, was absolutely outrageous.

You hear people all the time talking about what they did when they were in prison. They usually say prison is a piece of shit. When I got out, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to do it again. I know I never wanted to hurt anyone. Even if it happened, I didn’t mean to. So I’ll just have to deal with it now and keep going.

I have a lot to be grateful for, I fucked up and I’m glad I did it early in my life.

This is my journey. At times he was amazing, but there were also some pretty dark times.