Christ, what a tragedy.

Imagine basing your life on Leonardo di Caprio.

Seems he missed the plot point of that film : the guy _didn't_ get caught for a loooong while - whereas he got caught pretty quick. Time to change films, slick. Try something more like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Oh, forgot : you've got to be lucky to pull it off. Well, looks like you're actually going to have to work your ass off like the rest of us.

"The boy started his fraud career at 13 after watching the film Catch Me If You Can. "

Can I be the first to point out that this is unverified bollocks? Just because the papers decided that the easy angle on this con-artist's life of crime was "just like Catch Me If You Can. " does not mean;

a/ he ever watched it.

b/ it inspired him to start a career in fraud.

Or are you suggesting that movies and TV really do cause people to commit crimes?

This is simply lazy, follow the crowd, journalism

*or possibly a joke.

I reckon that, he'd be usefull to a large, legitimate business (if one will ever employ him now). He sold £250,000 worth of non-existent goods and he's only 16! Despite all his customers being 'ripped off', thats pretty impressive.

At the rate he's going, he'll get busted again at 18 and find himself in a place where men will be men and boys will be b*****es.

What is b*****es, I do not comprehend?

Thank you for time

Bruce

OK, so he sold a lot of TV's that didn't exist. Why does that make him useful again?

I could sell a lot of TV's that don't exist by simply pricing them about 10% below what they're normally available for, making a halfway plausible website and sending it to froogle.

Which is probably roughly what this little git is doing.

It sounds like the only way to stop him will be some sort of "clockwork orange" esque solution. Or permanent jail time.

Its not hard to sell £250K of no exists tent goods online. Since you have the only overhead of running the website. its very very easy. Since you can price your goods lower than it would cost to buy them at whole sale totally under cutting competition. Any one can sell 250K of goods if your nearest competitor has to pay for a physical item and have staff to package and distribute said items where as you just set a fictional price for a fictional good and some numpty clicks Buy and you get the total cash paid to you as your profit.

Any one of us could do this just we have morals and a few brain cells.

Anyone think this kid is more likely hunting a media-based fortune as well?

He should have worked through a proxy (TOR?) from a public computer which does not keep access logs, t set up a site in some bannana republic where they will not bother to investigate him. Once the site is up and working (all the design and testing can be done from home, before uploading it), all he has to do is sit back and profit, with money going into an overseas bank account.

Cheers for the outline |333173|3|_||3, who else is off to the nearest web caff??? I'm glad someone pointed out how to do it properly for the dumbasses like me around....!

Would he not still get prosecuted under the new 2006 UK Fraud Act? Possession of files to be used to commit fraud etc, is enough for prosecution. Plus the Computer Misuse Act could be used- since he is in the UK, its irrelevant where the fake page is hosted? So setting up in a banana republic wouldn't help for long, once UK folks started reporting him to the police....it would only complicate the trail a bit to add a bit of time... Or am I missing something/talking pure dumbass?

:-)