Off duty policeman helps snare travelling con artists (From The Northern Echo)

Off duty policeman helps snare travelling con artists

3:14pm Sunday 5th February 2012 in News By Neil Hunter

POLICE caught two travelling con artists when an off-duty officer became suspicious about their attempts to dupe a teenage shop worker and detained them, a court heard.

Romanian scamsters Mariciu Gartia and Pamela Sava targeted supermarkets in North Yorkshire with their sleight of hand trick which police called 'ringing the changes'.

The pair repeatedly asked staff to swap notes as they paid for their shopping and confused the workers so much they did not realise they had not received the money.

After police made a media release through The Northern Echo, a witness called them to report seeing the fraud in action in Tesco in Thirsk in late August last year.

Store bosses had already started their own investigation, and when police seized closed circuit television cameras they were able to identify 18-year-old Gartia.

Officers did not catch up with the fraudster and her friend, also 18, until September 9 when the pair tried the same trick in a Northallerton branch of the Co-op.

The women – both of Enver Road, Manchester – filled a trolley before paying the £200 bill in £20 notes, prosecutor Christopher Baker told Teesside Crown Court.

When the cashier had counted the money, they asked for it back so they could check the amount and used sleight of hand to remove a number of notes and handed it back.

They then distracted the 16-year-old worker so the money was not recounted before being placed into the till before making an excuse and demanding a full refund.

Lawyers for the pair, who both admitted fraud, accepted the crimes would have taken some planning but said they were towards to lower end of such offences.

Nigel Soppitt, for Sava, who has a three-year-old child, added: “She must have been influenced by somebody or something. It may well be she was a junior partner.

“Since the offence, she has knuckled down . . . her offending has stopped . . . she is eager to make reparation to the society she has wronged by working unpaid hours.”

Judge Peter Armstrong gave Sava a 12-month community order with 40 hours of community work, and Gartia a six-week prison sentence, suspended for a year.