EXPOSING the hustle while working the hustle isn’t ex actly a new concept to reality TV, but “The Real Hustle,” TruTV’s new show, is still an entertaining way to spend a half hour – and you might actually learn a thing or two.
The concept of the show is that three good-looking Gen Xers, who are experts (well sort of) at pulling off cons, pull off cons and scams on average Joes to show how easy it is for any of us to get our identities stolen. Although TruTV is supposed to be totally different from its old name, Court TV, this show isn’t all that different from an old Court TV show, “The Takedown.”
The team consists of Apollo Robbins, a pickpocket expert/personal security authority, Ryan Oakes, a sleight-of-hand and psychology “specialist,” and Dani Marco, an actress. While Dani has never stolen anyone’s identity or picked a pocket before being hired for the show, Apollo comes to the gig honestly – or dishonestly. His dad is a minister but his two brothers were pickpockets. Ryan is a University of Pennsylvania grad in psychology and has been a magician since he was 10 years old.
Tonight’s premiere (there are two episodes) open with an ATM scam that is truly horrifying. Apollo slips a fake slot-inserter thing, which contains a micro camera over the real slot-inserter thing on a free-standing ATM which enables the cons to read anyone’s information.
In the second ATM card theft, Apollo sits at an outside café right next to the ATM machine. He quickly spots which card a customer is using while Dani, using crutches, falls next to the machine causing the “mark” to reach down to help. Then he switches his matching Citi card with the mark’s and cleans out her account as soon as she leaves.
In another, Dani, posing as a waitress, places a hidden credit-card scanner on various parts of her clothing (boot, apron, back pocket) and secretly scans customers’ cards right in front of them. This, of course, adds to the tension, but it raises the question of why she’d bother scanning the cards in front of the customers at the table. After all, the server always takes the credit card and brings it inside, anyway. It makes no sense.
The one that lost me, though, is the one in which Apollo and Ryan pose as maintenance men at an upscale NYC hotel and go into a guest’s room, where hidden cameras have been placed, and proceed to rob her blind. Of course they give everything back, but meanwhile, the woman has been in, what she thinks, is the privacy of a hotel room but has, in fact, been watched and recorded by a hidden camera. Hello? I’d be on the phone with the cops -first to report a robbery and then to have the hotel manager and the producers of the show arrested for invasion of privacy. I mean, it is a hotel room – not a public place. People have been indicted for less.
Tonight at 10 & 10:30 on TruTV
* * ½