How to Get Away with Stealing

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MALE SPEAKER : Whoa, [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]

TONY SALES: My name's Tony Sales.
I'm 37 years of age.
It's been said that I'm one of Britain's biggest fraudsters.
In my time as a fraudster, I accumulated between 10 to 30
million pounds.
I spent six years of my life on the run, of which at the
end I served a prison sentence.
I've now set up a company called RID Fraud Ltd., which
combats the sort of frauds that I used to do to help this
growing epidemic that's happening throughout the UK.
I could sell rice to the Chinese.
Committing fraud was as easy as that for me.

The London fraud network is huge, starting with young
fraudsters--
MALE SPEAKER: The police couldn't give two flying pigs
about fraud.
I've only had one encounter, and I managed to fraud that.
TONY SALES: --To major organized criminal gangs
stealing multi-million pounds through
elaborate frauds and scams.
MALE SPEAKER: People don't want to appear silly.
That's why they don't ask questions.
MALE SPEAKER: All your name has to do is just pop up on
one of our computers, and it's done.
That's you.
MALE SPEAKER: Money means nothing.
Buy now, pay never.

TONY SALES: I'd put this telephone number down for a
number for my nan to contact from the school.
So if I decided to hop the wag or play truant, she could ring
this number, and I would answer the phone and say,
"Hello, Halstow School, can I help you?" I was 11, 12 when I
was doing that.
We'd go to every single one of those flats that were up in
there and get people to sign our
sponsorship form for a pound.
They'd phone a number, and they'd say, "Hello, is the
sponsorship form real?" And again, we'd say, "Yes, the
sponsorship form's real.
It's from Halstow School."
But when your belly's hungry, and you need to eat, and you
want to buy yourself a nice pair of trainers that all the
other kids have got on, they're the only
things you can do.
And that's how you learn the trade.

YOUNG CEE: This isn't really the life.
You're not making as much money as you
possibly can, legally.
As soon as you apply for a job, you have to wait forever.
And while waiting, you're on the streets, doing nothing.
If you're not doing nothing, then you're doing the daily
grind, which is shotting a little weed.
CALLEY: You have to commit these offenses in order to eat
your food for the day.
Obviously, there are risks involved in doing them things.
I've been shot at, and someone tried to stab me.
In my opinion, violence ain't the answer.
I would prefer to do the fraud scams.

ALIAS: I'm just going to try and find a nice pair of
trainers for myself.
Yeah, these are bad, innit?
You can get card details from hotels.
You can get them from secret fraternities online.
Getting hold of it is easy.
First got into it when I was a teenager in secondary school--
16, I would say.
EBay scam.
And I got some wrestling figures.
I mean, people would just ring me up and say, mate, can you
order me some Indian, please, or a pizza?
I'm fucking starving.
I've done stuff for people, and they haven't looked after
me in return.
With that being done, I know everything about them.
I'll just go and take a credit card out in their name.
I've even done it to a girl.
She deleted me off of Facebook and I put her arse into debt
for doing that.
[LAUGHS]
That's what happens when you delete me off Facebook.
[LAUGHS]
Top websites to completely annihilate if you're low on
money, need clothes, want food.
At number two is Harrods.
The security in Harrods is actually a pile of poo.
I remember me and my Slovenian boys, we raped it every single
day for a month.
They just went back to Slovenia with all
state of the art stuff.
And out there, they were getting top
dollar for it, as well.
At number one is Tesco, it's my favorite.
This is what we help the neighborhood out with.
For the single mums that don't have as much money as they
would like to, they give us a bell and we just order them
shopping to their house.
The security on Tesco's is rubbish.
But I'm happy that it's rubbish, because it's helped a
lot of people.
So I bought myself shitloads of DVDs because I want to
start a little pirate industry.
Give the little youngers something to do.
This is just pleasurable.
Warhammers, I love this stuff.
Limited edition Warhammers.
Wicked.

I mean, this is just this week alone.
Welcome to the life of fraud.

TONY SALES: London's full and diverse of all different types
of frauds going on continuously.
I think the most bizarre one I ever heard of and know about
is the Nigerian 419 scam of what they call black money.
The black money scam just basically cons people into
believing that there's a pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow.

MR. GOLD: My name is Mr. Gold, and I'm here to talk to you
about what we call Wash Wash.
And basically, what I want to show you now is how we can
turn $300 into maybe $300,000.
Sometimes we've targeted underworld people because,
number one, they're the only people who will have a
substantial amount of money sitting down at home,
unaccounted for.
Yes, we have taken money from the IRA.
We're not intimidated by them at all.
Maybe I'll say I'm the assistant to bin Laden.
I have exclusive access to his hoard of money.
The job now is to move the money from where it is to the
West, where it can be dealt with properly.
But then when I tell them that, unfortunately, the money
has come defaced.
But it's not an issue, because this is how security services
normally move the money.
And there are chemicals available in
order to wash the money.
The idea now is for him to buy enough chemical so that we can
do his wash by the end of the week.
We can never tell him what the secret chemical is.
It's not really expensive, but we will tell him it's very,
very expensive.
It's only available to governments, and whatnot.
Magic.
So you give them this.
So, there you go, Mr. Client.
Go down the road, go buy yourself McDonald's.
By the time they come back, the chest will be gone,
everything will be gone, everything will be clean.

Do people actually believe it?
Yes they do.
They believe it.
To be honest with you, I could not be in the room because I
would laugh.
I've got a nice house, yeah, and the cars, the women, the
whole shebang.
And it's a lifestyle that has been bought with
this kind of business.
Cut.

TONY SALES: Key still works.
Let's have a look.

This is just bank statements, a couple of wage slips,
couples of passports.
Absolutely everything in there.
Mortgage offers.
A lot of this stuff would have been given to people at a
proper company to disperse of it.
You know?
And maybe the guy who drove the van or works in the
company, who don't get the wages that he should be
getting for the job that he's doing, thinks, well, I can
have a little tickle, here.
And he sells it to the wrong person who then would try and
get hold of someone like me.
This is a mortgage application in here.
We got a copy of someone's passport.

We got a copy of someone's P60, so now we've got a
national insurance number.
We've got Barclay's bank statements with the account
number, sort code, everything else on it.
This is how easy it is, yeah?
You make a utility bill.
You can make a national insurance card, because you
got the national insurance number.
All these things are really easy to make once you've got
the right equipment.
So you go into the bank, with all the stuff that you've made
up now, and you just draw the money out over the counter.
Once you knew how to do all this stuff, we was instant
millionaires.
We could have whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it.
A4 pieces of paper are cash if you know how to
make them into money.

The final piece of the jigsaw is ID.
The best possible form of ID you can get
is a British passport.
People die on boats and stuff for this passport.
And they climb over mountains, and they go everywhere to try
and get this passport right here.
With this ID, people will give you anything.
They don't even question it.
And They just look at it.
They'll give you whatever you want, there and then.
Because as far as they're
concerned, it's a real passport.
If you make it good enough, no one's
going to question nothing.
So that's the most important part, is the photo ID.
So that bit's done now.
So now we just need to make the rest of the utility bills
and the bank statement.
And that's it.
We're going to make a complete bill with numbers on the back.
Everything it's meant to have, it's gonna have.
So when people look at it, they turn it over, it's going
to have all the numbers there.
Everything's in place.
Even the direct debit card slip is perfect to
how it should be.
There is no difference whatsoever.
It's absolutely perfect.

People would say it's hard work, but it's not.
It's an easy thing to do.
Whereas most people walk past the shop, and they don't see
anything, we're walking past the shop and thinking, oh,
let's have a little look in there and just
see what we can do.
SIMMER: She's green.
[INAUDIBLE]
TONY SALES: Look how young that girl is.
What, she's 20.
What's she going to know?
There's so much [INAUDIBLE]
coming to play.
Do you do finance?
My wife said you do, yeah?
FEMALE SPEAKER: It takes about 15, 20 minutes
to do on the system.
I just need some form of identification, preferably
like a debit card.
TONY SALES: Yeah, now these people are not trained in any
type of financial background at all.
You can go to them and say, I'd like to open a store card
today in your store, please.
And they'll say, OK, thank you.
Could you fill this form out, sir?
The House of Fraser store card.
Do you do a House of Fraser store card?
You do, yeah?
And do I have to have any ID with me?
FEMALE SPEAKER: We do need a form of ID,
like a credit card.
TONY SALES : All right, I've got that, yeah.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's fine, yeah?
All right.
Thank you very much!
SIMMER: They want you to take it more than they think you
want to take it.
So just let them sell it to you.
TONY SALES : Hello.
I was just making some inquiries, really.
I see you do up to three years' interest-free credit.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yes.
TONY SALES : I'm looking to get my wife a 10 year
anniversary present.
Yeah, that looks all right.
FEMALE SPEAKER: That's a nice-looking watch, isn't it?
TONY SALES : Yeah.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Marital status?
You're married, yeah?
10 years, was it?
TONY SALES : 10 years, yeah.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Same as me, this year.
TONY SALES : Oh yeah?
Well you don't look old enough to be married 10 years.
FEMALE SPEAKER: 10 years, July.
TONY SALES : Wow.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Do you have any proof of
residence at all with you?
Driving license or utility bill?
TONY SALES : I've got a utility bill.
Yeah.
I've left one bit in the car.
[LAUGHS]
Here you go.
Thanks.
They haven't got a clue what they're looking at, what ID
they're looking at, how to check to see if the
ID is real or not.
They don't have a clue.
And that person could issue you up to 5,000 pound credit
on the spot, there and then.
MALE SPEAKER: Right, you have six autographs in total, sir.
Signature there.
Signature and dates on that one.
And there's three copies of it, basically.
One for me, one for [INAUDIBLE], and one for us.
TONY SALES : OK, sir.
I'll go and get the card.
I've got to do a couple little bits just down there, yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: We'll have the watch ready, we'll have all
this done, all the paperwork sorted.
TONY SALES : Thank you, sir.
Thank you very much.

See you later, bye bye.
On one day, it could be that there might be 20 of us out.
And that girl does 20 applications in one day.
That poor girl is going to get in trouble.
SIMMER: Before I met Tony, I used to do robberies.
I was robbing doorstep collection people.
I was getting in so much trouble.
Prison, police stations, [INAUDIBLE].
It just got progressively worse.
It was wearing a bit thin.
I could see a long prison sentence coming out of
something like that.
I just met Hott.
And he just showed me a different way where I wasn't
getting into trouble so much.
He just brought me in like it was just an old
family sort of thing.
It was just an easy way of life.
I didn't worry about nothing.
I didn't have to worry about money.
Nice clothes, whatever I wanted.
Growing up, I never used to have nothing like that.
When I stopped robbing and started doing the fraud, it
was taking the face away from the crime, if you like.
Wasn't hurting nobody indirectly.
It's luck of the draw.
Because what you do is you're picking people.
You don't know the people you're picking.
You might have a million people, and all you're doing
is just picking the best name that suits yourself.
It's already happened to my mother.
She was the victim of identification fraud, as well.
Not saying that come from none of us, because it never come
from none of us.
But she was.
My family didn't want me to go the way I did.
But you take your own path in life, don't you?

TONY SALES: Like in a football team, the
striker scores the goal.
Fraud works in exactly the same way where at the end,
sometimes you build everything up, and you just need the last
part of the jigsaw puzzle to put it together.
9 times out of 10, that'll be someone like Kelly.

Men are men.
They will look at a gorgeous young girl, and they go weak
at the knees.
I can go in and corrupt the girls behind the counter.
But there's a lot more men working stores, and it's
easier for her to go in, flash her boobs, wink--
make the guy feel that he's special.
So she'll come out with 10 times more than what I can
come out with.
KELLY: Listen, I'll go out some little Geary.
He must be about eighteen.
And I'll mug him right off.

I will use my, what's the word, femininity.
TONY SALES: Femininity.
KELLY: [LAUGHS]
How do you say it?
TONY SALES: Femininity.
KELLY: Femininity.

I will use that.
Oh, please.
At the end of the day, love, I've
never, ever robbed anybody.
If I could get 50 grand off some silly bank, because I've
got a bit of paperwork, whatever,
I'm happy to do that.
I won't get out of my bed for 5,000.
Would I?
[LAUGHS]
TONY SALES: No, you wouldn't.
You love money too much, man.
KELLY: (LAUGHING) I wouldn't get out of my bed for it.
TONY SALES: You know, in that game sometimes people, when
they get a bit nervous, they turn to drink or drugs to just
sort of calm their nerves a little bit.
I think sometimes, a lot of what happens with these people
is that they've earned so much money in the past, and they've
had such a good life, that things start to
spiral out of control.
Before you know it, the party lifestyle is trying to
happen every day.

Dave?
DAVE: Goddamn!
Tony, come here.
TONY SALES: Hey, how you doing, mate?
You all right?
Yeah, mate, I'm all right.
You all right?
This is Dave.
DAVE COURTNEY: I do apologize about him.
I was right from the start.
I blame the parent.
I've known him a long time.
When I first met him, I had a fringe.
This is one of the local heroes of our little block.
Right?
He was always, and I mean this most sincerely, a little bit
smarter than your average bear, Boo-Boo, right?
He was a little bit above his years.
TONY SALES: Thank you.
DAVE COURTNEY: No, I don't mean it nice.
I looked at you as a threat.
I hated him.
I hated him.
[INAUDIBLE] talking to him [INAUDIBLE] a fancy smile.

Come on, you mastermind.
Now, I don't have to be the best fraudster.
'Cause I know him.
And he don't have to be the best fighter,
because he can ring me.
Each to his own.
Horses for courses, right peg in the right hole.
I'm a completely different era.
And the only way to be against the law, or criminal, in them
days, you all had the same haircut, you all had the flat
nose, and you was a gangster, you understand what I mean?
Now, as the world has evolved, everyone's got a little bit
more sharper.
You couldn't rob a bank.
It wouldn't be worth it.
Because everyone's paying with a check.
And when I used to do it, some old woman used to give you 200
grand, and we'd run off down the road.
And if you was unlucky, a cop would
chase you with a whistle.
It was fucking mental.
Their criminal mind is so sharp.
They'll crucifying and slaughtering these failsafe
things that they're doing within hours.
How could I get away with fraud?
Look at me.
Stop it.
Criminals spend their money very, very fast, because they
do not understand the concept of saving.
And when you run out of money, you just then go out
and nick some more.
So you don't have to do the saving.
You know what I mean?
Although you might not want to be squanderous and slap-happy
with your money, you can't help it.
Because it's easy come, easy go.
And I hate to say that, but it is like that.
Very much so in Tony's case, with the fraud thing.
He never, ever believed that that was ever going to stop.
Otherwise he wouldn't have wasted the money he did on
what he did.
He must have thought this would go on forever.

TONY SALES: [INAUDIBLE]

[MAKING GUN NOISES]
DAVE COURTNEY: Come then.
Next!
Yeah, but I can't make a passport.
I couldn't walk out of a fucking [INAUDIBLE] in
[INAUDIBLE].
Unless I went like that, give me the fucking, give me the
fucking [INAUDIBLE].
Know what I mean?
How's that for a fraud?
Boom.

I'm rubbing my cock on her ankle.
I'm rubbing my cock on her ankle.
The illusion that anyone that's on the wrong side of
the law is more exciting is an illusion, but it definitely is
an aphrodisiac.
These little creatures, here, that look like they walked off
the front of a magazine wouldn't be sitting in my back
garden, letting me molest her ankle if I was a milkman.
They make me feel like I'm 25, about 6'8", and Jamaican.

Step this way.
Look.
After you.
Listen, God didn't give you a bum like that
to walk behind me.
Fucking hell.

I'm loving the way your legs bend, blondie.
I'm liking that little bend you do.
FLORA: I can tell the difference between gangsters
and them sort of straight guys, just even down to the
way they talk a lot of the time, and the words they use.
DAVE COURTNEY: Oh, your fucking legs!
[LAUGHS]
FLORA: I just have that side to me that finds it attractive
or feels excited by them.
It's not like I were used to that.
Like when I was a teenager, when I was a kid, I was
completely innocent.
I didn't think, oh, I want to hang around gangsters.
It was just something that happened, really.
I prefer the fraud side of crime, more than anything
else, like violence and drugs.
It is more clever.
It's finding loopholes in today's society.
Because on both sides you've got people that are making a
lot of money.
And if everyday people can use their brain enough to find a
way to look after their kids lovely, their girlfriend
lovely, make a nice house, sometimes I do think, well,
good on to you.
You've put enough brain power into it, you've made things
happen out of nothing.
And it might be bad to say, but I guess I don't
mind that too much.
I know that I've had friends that have had their identity
stolen and their banks cleared.
So they will probably hate me for that.
And I know that's really bad.
But fraud is more commendable?
DAVE COURTNEY: It's our duty as a criminal, as soon as
you're doing something that the rest of the world don't
like, which is crime, you should at least do it with as
much dignity, honor, respect, class, quality,
professionalism, as possible.
Because what you're doing is scummy, so at
least do it with honor.
That'll be a nice one.

Alright, thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen,
thank you very much.
The Courtney Show is over.

TONY SALES: I did tell you that.
You don't listen to me.
I told you the other day.
MINDY: You didn't tell me.
TONY SALES: I'm not arguing with you.
MINDY: You were out last Saturday.
TONY SALES: What are you, my mum?
MINDY: No, I'm your fucking wife that's sitting here
looking after your children.
That's what.
TONY SALES: Yeah, please, babe, can you do
that for me, yeah?

Mindy?
I think she's gone now.
[LAUGHTER]
TONY SALES: There's my son, there.
There's my little boy.

This is where I live now.
I've obviously moved on from the big houses and the big
cars and stuff.
Now I'm trying to change my life around and go legit.
It's a lot harder than when you're just
taking stuff for free.
The thought of going and getting it for financial gain
doesn't bother me in the slightest.
But actually deceiving my wife and my family is the one thing
that got to me more than anything.
Born on the same day as me.

He's a good boy, though.
He's not going to be a naughty one.
Aren't you?
Hey.
Go on.

I've started a company now to prevent fraud.
KELLY: [LAUGHS]
TONY SALES: I have.
I've gone straight, Kel.
And now I've got my own company called RID Fraud.
KELLY: [LAUGHS]
TONY SALES: And it specializes in dealing
with identity theft.
And we're going to teach companies that we used to
whack how to stop it.
For real.
KELLY: Can I have a job?
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING]