Mr. Castro. Your Limo has arrived

No not Fidel. Elliot Castro.

Hard to believe how life sometimes turns out. Sometimes people get themselves into a hole because of a moment, a turning point in their life in which one bad decision spirals out of control through a series of reinforcing consequences. Expecting bad things to happen, instead things work out and the sense is that there may not actually be any consequences.

And time passes and the hole gets deeper and deeper. Until there really is no going back. And then you get caught.

So I've been reading today about Elliot Castro. A Scottish 24-year old man who has been living a life of deceit and fraud since he was 16 it seems. It all started with some little things, forging train tickets, getting in to night-clubs while under-age, and stuff like that. Then came a moment of truth, finding himself alone in a stranger's bedroom while at a party he spied a credit card on a table. He chose poorly.

Things then went from there, from a few petty transactions to stealing the credit card details and personal information from customers calling the callcentre where he worked.

It just went on and on.

He was caught eventually and jailed for two years I think. At his trial the police confirmed that the only item recovered from a 4 year spree of spending other peoples money was a Rolex watch. Everything else was spent mostly on business class airfares, hotel suites, limo hire, food and drink. A traceable path but nothing tangible to show for it.

It's hard to know if the guy is remorseful. He was living his dream of travel and purchasing power. Now he's in a cell. Would he be likely to go back and do a regular job?

Read about the story in The Guardian and about his sentencing in the News & Star.

He's working nowadays as a DJ hence the photo in the first link. He also has a myspace page.

I'm left with the distinct feeling that it was just too easy to do what he did. People are so trusting and others are completely remorseless about abusing that trust. The real question is whether the focus should be on making people generally less trusting, or on better policing of the kind of fraud perpetrated in cases like these.

And it all began with that credit card on the table. It could have all been so different.