Charity conwoman avoids jail after taking collection tins

Claire Kierczek avoided jail, despite having a similar conviction on her record and being subject to a suspended prison sentence at the time.

She had denied two charges of fraud, but was found guilty by magistrates who committed her to Warwick Crown Court to be sentenced.

Kierczek, aged 32, of Buffery Road, Dudley, was given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years.

She was ordered to take part in a drug rehabilitation programme, made subject to a curfew for six months, and fined £1 for breaching her earlier suspended sentence. That was imposed at Wolverhampton Crown Court last year.

Nicholas Smith, prosecuting, said that in November last year Kierczek was at Asda in Jubilee Crescent, Coventry, posing as a representative of the Royal British Legion.

She showed staff a fake ID, and said she was there to collect charity boxes. Kierczek took two boxes, one of them a British Legion box with an estimated £200 in it, and left two empty ones in exchange.

Once her con was realised CCTV recordings were seized by police, from which she was identified. But by then she had struck again, this time at the Coventry Trophy Centre in Burnaby Road, Coventry, where she told director Marc Stewart she was there to change the charity box.

He removed the chain from the Warwickshire Air Ambulance box, containing about £50, but became suspicious when Kierczek replaced it with a box for a different charity.

She assured him she worked on behalf of various charities. He added that at the time Kierczek was subject to a 12-month community order imposed by Birmingham magistrates for a similar offence in November 2015 of posing as an employee to steal charity boxes.

Then at Wolverhampton Crown Court in March last year, for converting criminal property by selling a camera that had been stolen in a burglary, she had been given the two-month suspended sentence.

Recorder Christopher Donnellan QC said: "It is mean. It justifies custody. But if she has a drug problem and it is on-going, I am minded to follow the recommendation in the pre-sentence report. I am going to give her a chance to sort out the heroin problem."

Sentencing Kierczek and ordering her to pay compensation of £50 to the Air Ambulance and £75 to the British Legion, he told her: "People who give to charities in boxes in shops are often people giving small amounts because that is all they can afford to give, people who do not have the means to make large donations or standing orders. It is often those small amounts that make big differences to charities."