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The Real Hustle

The Real Hustle presenters
  • Posted at 12:16pm
  • 19 September 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 4 comments

Most of us have wised up to the obvious scams, such as the email asking to transfer $1million to our bank account, or the one where five suspicious-looking men turn up to read our gas meter. But there are still countless ways of being made to look pathetically gullible, and The Real Hustle is methodically working its way through them.

The show’s slogan is: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is". The utopian dreamers among you might see this as needlessly cynical but, unlike one poor chap in Monday's show, you probably haven't just forked out £400 on eBay for what you thought was a designer office chair, but actually turned out to be a six-inch high replica. Ouch.

There are three presenters on hand to help us avoid such humiliation. Suave, good-looking Alex, the "confidence trickster"; Jess, the "sexy swindler", who pouts and sashays through the opening credits wearing a few wispy bits of clothing; and Paul, the "scam artist" – a large, bearded guy who probably ended up on the show after the producers had spent several weeks searching in vain for a scam artist who also looked like an airbrushed model.

Jess has all the model credentials, but her scamming activities on Monday's show were limited to nicking a purse from someone's bag and performing a pub trick which has been knocking around backstreet boozers for decades.

In the publicity blurb for the show, we're promised the spectacle of Jess making £200 by convincing someone that she's just been run over. But look, Jess is a woman in her early 20s who is also a successful topless centrefold model, so it wouldn't be that surprising to read "Jess makes £200 by asking a dumbstruck male to give her £200".

The kind of scams we usually encounter are so obvious that we just roll our eyes in disbelief. There's a guy who persistently hangs around on the A24 near my flat, trying to persuade passers-by that he's run out of petrol. The biggest drawback to his plan is the absence of any car – an anomaly he has some difficulty explaining.

Similarly, most of the scams featured in Monday's show could, at least in theory, be spotted a mile off. Alex targeted a hotel receptionist by posing as a lord and pretending he had a case of valuables. Anyone who has watched a certain episode of Fawlty Towers will have seen this scam in action, but despite Alex even using the same name as the bogus lord in the sitcom – Melbury – the receptionist was as credulous as poor Basil Fawlty.

Another segment showed people still getting suckered into the classic three-card monte trick, also known as “find the lady”. Look, if you see a bloke on the street with a table in front of him, that's already suspicious. If you see that the table has three identical objects on it, he's either running a really rubbish car-boot sale, or he's a conman – both good reasons to walk in the opposite direction.

The programme advises us to watch and learn from the mistakes of others. But there are two lessons going on here: how to avoid, and how to perpetrate. Regular viewers of BBC3 will be clued-up, while those who aren't will now be prime targets for scams effected by regular viewers of BBC3. My advice: become a regular viewer of BBC3.

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  • Posted on 19 September 2007
  • at 1:50pm
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

Rob: Yes, I'm ashamed that I also found myself being forced – purely because of Reithian values of accuracy and so forth – to research the claim that she was a topless centrefold model.

Steve: I know what you mean, but at the same time if someone points at my chest, and says "look at that", I look down at their finger and then they smack me in the face. There are some things that human beings are automatically pre-programmed to do. And standing around a table being royally ripped off by a man in a hat is, it seems, one of those things.

  • Posted on 19 September 2007
  • at 1:29pm
  • by CarsmileSteve

i'm amazed when i see blokes doing some form of three-card monte outside of east ham tube station, surely it is a universally known con?

  • Posted on 19 September 2007
  • at 1:16pm
  • by robsoft

(returns)Ahem.

I'm terribly sorry. You're right. She doesn't look quite so glamourous in the TV show, but elsewhere she's seems to be a very, er, attractive young woman.

  • Posted on 19 September 2007
  • at 12:58pm
  • by robsoft

Was/is Jess really a glamour model? I ask because although I willingly bow to your greater expertise in such matters, she didn't look that special to me. Nice enough, but possibly lacking a certain gravity of charm I'd have thought was a prerequisite.Anyway, your point about her contribution is spot-on - she's definitely there to take the edge of the blokes, pad-out the dull bits and inject some much-needed glamour to the show.I saw one a few weeks ago that involved tricking a guy into buying a motorbike in the pub, giving the cash to the 'landlord' as an escrow thing and then having the scamming presenter do a runner with the bike at the end of the test-drive. The poor punter goes back into the pub to find the 'landlord' wasn't, and isn't even there, having scarpered with the punter's hard-earned (etc).But in this particular scam, the punter sussed part way through and ran off after Alex as he tried to drive away on a rather crap-looking motorbike. Alex did actually get away, but it turned out this was only because the punter had a gammy leg and couldn't run after him for more than a moment or two.The moral of that particular story? That was a scam that only works on the injured or elderly.

Like you, I really felt that this program had more to offer would-be crap scam artists than it did to 'honest' members of the public.Still, you have me intrigued about Jess. And me being on the work computer n'all, too.

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