I was just watching a BBC programme called The Real Hustle, in which the TV people play supposedly real cons on unsuspecting members of the public, and then reunite them with their money or belongings and ask them to allow their experiences to be filmed, presumably as a public service. Today’s focussed on holiday scams, and one of them didn’t seem like a very real hustle to me.
The programme had some guys set up a “left luggage” facility in a shop unit, with lockers installed and people encouraged to rent the lockers and deposit their things. At the end of the day, men would come in vans and remove the lockers, complete with the customers’ things. Just for added believability, there were about eight or ten columns of lockers and the guys arrived in short-wheelbase, low-height Mercedes vans. I’m not sure if you could have fit one of these columns in the back of one of those.
How believable is this? That scam would require a lot of vans and a lot of men, and would be very obvious, and given the density of CCTV in this country, it would be spotted probably well before they got the chance to remove the lockers. Has it ever happened? Some of the scams on that programme were more than credible, but this one smacked of inventing a con just to make a juicy bit of TV.
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Tags: bbc, the real hustle
Good question - how real is it?
When “The Real Hustle” first started (in the wake of the silly but entertaining series “Hustle”), the scams were realistic and very believable. Above all, they were cheap and easy to do. So the programme served a very useful purpose.
Possibly, as with Ali G, the “real hustlers” Paul, Alex and Jess, are better known to the public, and want to up the ante. But the programme no longer serves a useful purpose if it isn’t realistic.
The better scams are at home, rather than on holiday.