The real hustler
BY CATHERINE WOULFE
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THE audition for The Real Hustle NZ was the strangest Kimberley Hill, 26, had ever been to.
“We all came away thinking ‘Oh, maybe we got scammed, maybe it was a scam audition’, because it was a bit of a funny process,” says the stunning – and surprisingly sneaky – professional dancer.
The audition started at Starbucks, where a producer met Hill and other wannabes, then sent them out to the streets to start scamming people.
The challenge was to stop passersby and get them to hand over security details, like the types of alarms they had on their houses. If this scam had been for real, Hill would have then known exactly how to burgle those houses.
“I explained, ‘Hey, I’m doing this survey and we’re giving away a trip for four to Fiji’,” she says laughing. “I had lots of old men stop, they were the easiest targets.”
In the second challenge, Hill had to somehow convince people to let her use their mobile phone. She thinks this scam was about accessing Bluetooth.
“I went up to people in a mad panic and pretended I’d jumped out of the car to put money in the meter, and someone’s just jumped in my car and driven off, and I need to call my boyfriend. And I felt really terrible because these guys that I targeted were very concerned and they wanted to ring the police.”
Hill hustled them anyway and went so far as to make a real phone call – to her baffled friends – to make the scam convincing. She got the job.
She says she didn’t find it too difficult to add “hustler” to her dayjobs of dancing for the NZ Breakers, and MCing for halftime shows at Warriors’ games.
“I think it’s sort of in my sense of humour, it’s in my nature to joke around a bit with little fibs, having people on and targeting friends of mine that I think are quite gullible.”
You’ll be seeing Hill in action tomorrow when The Real Hustle hits New Zealand for the first time. She is one of three hustlers – her partners in crime are magician and former private investigator Andre King and Aaron Beard who describes himself as the “ultimate opportunist”.
The three worked together to hustle Kiwis on candid camera, then told their “marks” how they’d been scammed. All of these “marks” had to give consent to appear on screen.
The BBC show has been big overseas, and has helped the public wise up to real scams such as ATM card-readers and swapping a fake £20 note for smaller, real cash.
Hill says learning about the scams made the crew extremely twitchy about their gear while filming. “I’ve had friends who have seen the show overseas and said they’ve become very wary of it and it’s always in the back of their minds,” she says.
And despite Hill’s obvious sneakiness, she has been sucked in to a real-life scam – twice.
“I got scammed in a taxi. I paid with a credit card and it was $15 or something and when I got the credit card bill they’d changed the one to a four, so it was actually a $45 taxi ride – when it was only 10 minutes up the road!
“It’s actually happened to me twice. The first time I just sort of left it but the second time I followed up with the bank, because it was the principle of it, that I’m not going to let them get away with it.
“I did get the money back – minus the $15 taxi fee. I thought they should have given that back too.”
The Real Hustle NZ premieres on TV3, tomorrow at 8pm.
- © Fairfax NZ News
