Businessman Jamie Monteiro allegedly made at least £37,000 by sending out young men to collect cash for bogus good causes with names including ’Kids at Christmas’ and ’Save a Heart’.
His Newton Abbot company Youth Recruit was in fact giving half to the collectors and keeping the rest for itself, Exeter Crown Court was told.
Monteiro allegedly used a series of ploys to try to get round laws which control street collection and charity donations, but his operation was ‘a con and a scam’, a jury was told.
Street collectors told shoppers donations would go to homeless children or the housing charity Shelter.
Figures from Monteiro’s bank account showed he deposited just under £37,000 when he was running Youth Recruit.
Monteiro, aged 27, of Oaklands Road, denies five counts of fraud.
Mr David Sapiecha, prosecuting, said Monteiro set up Youth Recruit and ran it from his former home in Newton Abbot.
It sent young men around Devon, Cornwall and Somerset during 2014 and the first half of 2015 with collecting buckets.
On the face of it, the operation was similar to the Big Issue with collectors apparently selling a one page A4 leaflet for between 50 pence and £2.50.
The leaflet specified that Youth Recruit was not a charity and said the money was helping to provide employment for the sellers, who kept half the cash with the rest going on administrative expenses.
Mr Sapiecha said that in reality they were collecting money and the leaflets were rarely sold and only carried to exploit a loophole in the law by which sellers of periodicals are exempt from the normal controls on street trading.
He said the intention was to make people believe they were charity collectors and it was a scam.
He said: ‘Those carrying out frauds often find ways of complicating matters so it can take effort to disentangle the web of deceit and get inside the subtleties that are put in place.
‘The impression they gave to the public was that they were collecting for charity. We say the public were being misled by seeing people on the street with collecting buckets. They would think they were collecting for charity.
‘Monteiro says they were out selling periodicals and what they were holding were street tills and not collecting buckets. We say it was a scam to avoid scrutiny by the authorities.
‘People are much more willing to part with their cash for charity, so it is an attractive ploy for a fraudster to appear to be collecting for charity.
‘Our case is that the so-called periodicals are props, used as part of a deceit. If you look at the reality of what was happening on the streets, the public were being conned into thinking they were donating to charity.’
Mr Sapiecha said both the collectors and the leaflets made untrue claims that money was going to charity.
These included claims that money given in Newton Abbot and Teignmouth in December 2015 was going to ’Children at Christmas’ and was to be used to buy toys for children in hospital.
Shoppers in Truro and Penzance were told that money was going to ’homeless and hungry children in Cornwall’ and a collection at a Morrison’s supermarket in Cornwall was said to have been for ’Save a Heart’ supposedly raising money to supply a defibrillator.
At least one of the ’periodicals’ claimed money was to be given to Shelter, even though they had never received anything or had any knowledge of Monteiro’s operation.
The pamphlets themselves were just a single piece of paper in which much of the wording stayed the same during nine editions, although pictures of children were added in some to make them more appealing to the public.
He also organised a draw with a laptop or iPad as the first prize but tried to get round the laws regulating such raffles by writing on tickets that it was not a raffle or lottery.
Fake collection tins for the charity Meningitis Help were found at Monteiro’s lock-up garage, along with Youth Recruit items, but there was no evidence they had been used.
Mr Sapiecha said the first reports of Youth Recruit collections started in 2013 in Torbay and Exeter but the alleged frauds took place in 2014 and 2015 at towns including Penzance, Truro, Barnstaple, and Taunton.
He said it is not possible to assess the scale of the fraud as all takings were in cash and half were kept by the operatives. The only indication is that Monteiro paid almost £37,000 into his personal bank account.
Monteiro is representing himself. His case is that nobody was deceived and they were providing employment for young people through the legitimate sale of periodicals.