The real hustle on BBC3: watch it!

For UK residents: BBC Three is re-running their wonderful 10-episode series “The Real Hustle” in which three skilled con artists give, with hidden cameras, a revealing and entertaining guided tour of the most popular scams used to rip off people today. Some computer-based (including keyloggers, bluejacking and bank card cloning), most not.

This series should be required viewing for all security professionals and most definitely for all security students. The only way to understand security is by understanding what crooks actually do. It’s also great fun.

Each episode is re-broadcast several times, from prime time to middle-of-the-night, so you usually get several chances to set your digital video recorder if the programme overlaps with something else you want to watch or record. Check the EPG.

9 thoughts on “The real hustle on BBC3: watch it!

  1. I’m not from UK. I don’t even have a TV! But I have a computer, a good internet connection and a bookmark for my favorite torrent site. FIGHT THE MACHINE! 🙂

  2. I watched the first program and was disappointed. I don’t think that impersonating a policeman, and producing a forged search warrant, in order to steal a car from someone is logically all that different from the Cape Town trick of shoving a Kalashnikov up his wife’s nostril as they wait at a red traffic light.

    Once upon a time I personally had to think about how to tell a real cop from a bogus one – when as a member of the University’s governing body I was a declared target of the Animal Liberation Front. There are ways to do this but puiblishing them is hard. Suppose the advice from your local chief constable is ‘if alleged policeman responds to stimulus X with response Y then it’s OK to citizens-arrest him and dial 999’: publishing this would quickly make the test ineffective.

    On balance I think that current policy (I you pretend to be a cop you go to jail for a long time) may be optimal. I would rather not live in Iraq, where death squads so often dress up as cops that your rational response to a man in a cop uniform trying to stop you is to shoot him.

    Any interesting security-economics issues here?

    Ross

  3. Hi, i’ve missed episode number 4? (Thursday 28th September 2006). If anyone has it recorded on their computer or something, could you please upload it so i can download and watch it please? Or even better, if you know a website where i can download/watch that episode, please let me know, thanks 🙂

  4. most of the cons on there are short hand cons, obvious ones used for generations i like to think ‘we’ as people are using slighty more inventive scams then the ones on this program, and besides there’s much more money in the long con now-adays!

  5. love the setups, though i am sure the shop owners must know whats goig on- how else do the hidden cams get installed?

    oh, and that Jess is a hottie!

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