TWO bogus couriers who fleeced pensioners were labelled mean and despicable by a judge yesterday.

David Maverick and Paul Carter spent weeks planning the scam using fake Cash on Delivery parcels and even buying 600m of brown paper wrapping.

They told police that they got the idea from an episode of the television series Hustle, said prosecutor Jolyon Perks.

They got victims to sign clipboard receipts printed First Choice Couriers and they demanded £20 payment for one parcel which contained just a battered box and another with a Batman jigsaw.

Carter,17, who knocked on doors while Maverick,20, sat outside in a blue van, told an 82-year-old woman that she had a parcel from Knitters Direct.

Younger relatives contacted police concerned about the activities of the pair who wore fluorescent tabards with homemade laminated badges, Teesside Crown Court was told.

Mr Perks said: "They acted on the pretext that they were legitimate couriers delivering packages.

"The victims because of their age were vulnerable."

Some of the pensioners refused to accept the parcels because they were immediately suspicious of the callers at their homes in Redcar, Ormesby and Eston.

Police caught them the same day, and in Maverick's van they found four undelivered parcels. In his home they discovered a large number of addresses, names and phone numbers which clearly were to be used in continuing the deceptions, said Mr Perks.

Maverick's computer showed that they had been planning it for some time.

There were text messages to Carter on his mobile phone saying that he intended to wear a blue shirt, a high visibility jacket, and asking for signs to be printed.

Robin Turton, defending Maverick, said: "These were mean offences, there's no way of getting away from that.

"Yes, there was a degree of sophistication and a great deal of trouble had been gone into by the defendant. The idea came from Carter, but most of the work seems to have been done by Mr Maverick."

He added: "They were two young men who had seen an episode of Hustle in which an incident of a similar thing takes place and they went on to consider putting together this scam.

"But they were not targeting pensioners. They went out during the day and it just so happens that the only people who were at home were elderly people."

Robert Mochrie, defending Carter, said that Carter was being treated for depression over his fear at going to prison.

The judge Recorder Neil Davey QC ordered that the men's mobile phones and computers should be seized and destroyed.

The judge added: "You have both pleaded guilty to offences which you have heard your own counsel describe as both mean and despicable.

"I think you should both be absolutely ashamed of yourselves. I accept that your victims were not targeted from the outset as being elderly and vulnerable, but the fact is that they turned out to be elderly people."

Maverick, of High Street, Eston, and Carter, of Millbrook Avenue, Middlesbrough, were both ordered to do 100 hours unpaid work with a 12-month community rehabilitation order with supervision after they pleaded guilty to five fraud offences committed on May 18 last year.