Manchester's King of 'Twining' Could Steal Your Money and Your Fags

Skin (on the left) with the kind of glint in his eye you can only get from conning shop-keepers on a daily basis.

If you're up on your immigration news, you might have read that up to 30 million Romanians and Bulgarians are likely to be granted the right to live in the UK from next year onwards. Depending on how you like your news (relatively neutral and factual, or alarmist, speculative and inflammatory), you may also have read that all of those prospective immigrants are criminals who will steal your nan's dog, eat it and use its skin to make a wallet to keep her stolen life's savings in.

Judging by public opinion, it doesn't sound like anyone in either of those countries is particularly excited about "invading" the UK to join its 2.52 million unemployed and – quite obviously – they're not all criminals. Nevertheless, Britain's right-wing press seems to have forgotten that, as a nation, we do a fair bit for the exportation of criminals to other countries around the world ourselves. But then they might not be familiar with "twiners", a uniquely British brand of confidence trickster, most of whom have to move abroad to keep their scams going so they don't keep hitting the same spots over and over, getting found out and going to jail.

The twining scam basically involves getting shop owners to hand over larger amounts of change than they owe and can generate hundreds of pounds a week. It might not sound like much, but it's not a bad haul for the kind of con you could learn from a two-minute segment of The Real Hustle. I heard through some ex-con friends of mine that the king of twining was a guy called Skin from Hattersley in Greater Manchester. Skin had travelled all over the world, twining in a new town or city each week, moving on before anyone got wind of what he was up to. So I gave him a call and had a chat about his illustrious twining career.

Skin relaxing in Newquay after a hard day's twining.

VICE: Hi Skin. How did you first get into twining?
Skin: When I was 15, me and my mate Stingy watched an old black and white American film and saw people doing this scam on it. We thought we’d sussed out how it worked, so we nipped over the hill into Glossop, Derbyshire to try it out. We hit around 20 shops and made £100 within a few hours. We were amazed that it worked. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we’ve hit the jackpot with this one!’

How does this particular scam work?
Basically, you'd go into a shop and buy ten cigs for 70p using a fiver. You get back four quid and some change. You tell the fella behind the counter that you might as well give him a quid so he can give you a fiver and you aren’t stuck with all that change. Then you make sure you get the fiver off the fella before giving him the quid.

Okay, I can see how this works. I'm pretty confused already.
Next, you give him four quid and a fiver and he thinks there’s been a mistake and offers to swap the fiver for a quid. You say, "Here’s another quid, mate. You might as well just give me a tenner." The fella hands you the tenner without even realising that he's been tricked. It’s all about front; the people in the shop are taken in by your confidence.

How much could you make from a day’s twining?
I’d make £100 each day and then stop, which would take me around three hours. It was good money; you can’t argue with £700 a week off 21 hours’ work. I’d buy ten fags at every paper shop, so at the end of each day I’d have a big parcel of cigs. I’d do grocery shops as well and end up with two bags full for me mam, per day. It worked in any shop where you could spend under a pound.

And you took your twining career international, right?
Yeah, I’ve done Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Australia and Thailand. I used the twining so that I could go abroad and enjoy life. I ended up going all over Europe, living in hotels and always having enough money for beer off the back of it. You’d never get rich off it, but I lived pretty comfy for years. It worked in every country where you had a note that was half the value of another note.

Skin and his son in Germany.

What was your success rate, then? Did it work every time?
No, I was successful nine out of ten times. The other one time, I’d just say, "Oh sorry" and make out that it was a mistake. I only got arrested once for it in 15 years of doing it and managed to get off after being locked up for a bit.

What country was that in?
Thailand. I was in a lock-up under a police station for six months. I passed the time by smoking a drug called "ya ba" [a mixture of crystal meth and caffeine] that they have over there. They're these little red and green tablets that get you totally fucked. I was able to pay for food to be brought in from outside, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Without that, I would have been on a bowl of soup that looked like dish water. There were 40 of us in one cell and the girl prisoners, who were all brasses [prostitutes], were in the cell opposite.

And that was for twining?
Yeah. There was another time in Thailand where I was stealing Lonely Planet travel books and selling them to a stall owner in Bangkok. It’s double easy shoplifting in Thailand, but double heavy if it comes on top. I got caught once in the supermarket and the security guard, who was just a young kid, pulled a big gun on me and took me in the back and put me in cuffs. He searched me and found that I had some rubies on me that I’d robbed from some earrings in Australia. He asked how much they worth, I said, "8,000 baht," which is the equivalent of £178, and he made a deal where I got to go free if he could keep them. They were fake stones that were only worth a fiver, so I was buzzing. I got caught thieving from one of the local stalls as well and two Thai lads Thai kick-boxed the fuck out of me.

That doesn't sound great. Weren’t you a bit apprehensive about twining in a country like Thailand?
No, because you get so confident when you’re doing it every day as a job that you just get used to it and you’re not nervous. If you came across as shaky, or a little bit shady, then it wouldn’t have worked. The skill to it was how natural and confident you were with the shopkeeper.

So I take it that was the worst country that you twined in. What would you say was the best?
Australia, because the money was easy to work with and there was no language barrier. I learned little bits of other languages for the other countries, but it wasn’t the same. In countries like Holland and Belgium, they mostly spoke English anyway, so they were OK. The language barrier in Thailand made it hard.

Skin has now retired from the twining game.

More British crime:

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How to Be Happy, Young and Jobless

Getting Life Lessons from Manchester's Jet-setting Career Thieves

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