"Answer: Wealthy tourists"
"Question: Who would Willie Sutton be talking to today?"
Posted on 01/15/2015 5:45:01 PM PST by Hojczyk
A professional beggar who travels hundreds of miles from his home in Lancashire to London’s Mayfair has been using a credit card reader to accept payments from wealthy tourists.
Damien Preston-Booth, 37, commutes from his rented home in the north-west, but pretends to be homeless when he asks passers-by for money on the streets of London.
As well as taking cash from wealthy tourists in the exclusive Mayfair area, he also has a mobile card reader and accepts payments to his PayPal account.
The reader is linked by Bluetooth to his smartphone and the donor receives a receipt for the donation via email. A former friend of Mr Preston-Booth, told The Sun he has earned thousands of pounds begging and also alleged that he took five or six foreign holidays a year.
It is claimed Mr Preston-Booth, who lives on benefits in a £300 a month rented flat in Preston, Lancashire, travels to London by coach on a Wednesday and spends three days sleeping rough while begging.
He also claimed his trips abroad had been in order to look for work and said he was now trying to sort his life out.
Begging is illegal and the maximum penalty is a £1,000 fine. A total of 2,771 cases were brought before magistrates in England and Wales in 2013/14.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I never knew that word was spelled that way. But it is.
"Answer: Wealthy tourists"
"Question: Who would Willie Sutton be talking to today?"
WOW, and hubby thought things had gone to hell when he saw the bong-seller at the Grateful Dead taking credit cards years ago.
Note to self: if a beggar has a card reader, or even a smart phone, he doesn’t need my money.
This is probably not that effective a technique. It makes you look too professional, like you could hold a job. You want to appear really pitiful as a beggar.
Begging laws were first introduced in London during Elizabeth I. First offense was jail. Next was a fine. And persistent beggars were hung.
When her father, Henry VIII, destroyed the monasteries, he also destroyed the institution of charity that the people themselves had developed without the help of the king. So, the poor began moving to London.
Churchgoers were even fined if they did not give money for the poor.
But in the end she was unable to remedy what her father had begun.
For him, it has been effective. He’s taken great vacations, and he’s still relying on his government for benefits! Sounds some of the “entrepreneurs” here in the US.
The article says he’s ‘sleeping rough’, that is to say on a park bench in the winter. If he were really a successful beggar, he could afford to rent a room.
Maybe you missed the first two paragraphs of the article. He does rent a home, hundreds of miles away. He does the “sleeping rough” technique to make it look like he’s really a beggar to the tourists in the area.
***A professional beggar who travels hundreds of miles from his home in Lancashire to London’s Mayfair has been using a credit card reader to accept payments from wealthy tourists.
Damien Preston-Booth, 37, commutes from his rented home in the north-west, but pretends to be homeless when he asks passers-by for money on the streets of London.***
Note to self: ‘If you see a beggar with a card reader, do not give money.’
I guess beggars can be choosers after all.
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