Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster review

His scams gave him a champagne lifestyle where he travelled the world first class as a teen. But this insight-free documentary really deserves no more than hour of your time, tops

Programme-bloat is a common problem on streaming platforms. They have money, no taste and a lot of hours to fill. The BBC’s rigour and shaky funding structure as a public broadcaster generally mitigates against it following suit, but occasionally mistakes are made. One such is Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster, which devotes three 45-minute episodes to the very simple story of Elliot Castro, instead of the one fun hour it should have been.

Castro was a bright lad desperately bullied and unhappy at school. His dad was Chilean and Elliot liked to take the Financial Times to school to feel grown up – either of these was enough to make him a target in 1990s Aberdeen, he says. He left school at 16 in 1998 with no qualifications. He claimed he was 18 and got a job in a call centre selling mobile phones – an early sign of the chutzpah that fitted him for the life of crime he was about to embark on. There, he found himself in the happy position of having to take down people’s confidential credit card details as part of his job, then started pretending to need extra information about their savings accounts to finish the paperwork. He used those details to order another card to be sent to his home address to fund an increasingly lavish lifestyle – in teenage terms – until each one was cancelled and he would begin again.

Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster is on BBC iPlayer and will air on BBC Three on 5 June