The budget flight crime wave: Romanian pickpocketing gangs use low-cost airlines to target cities and fly home in time for tea



Europol director Rob Wainwright says the gangs are active across Europe



Exploit low-cost airlines by targeting city and getting 'back in time for tea'



He said police cooperation is needed to halt the crime wave

No-frills airlines and Europe’s free travel rules are being exploited by Romanian gangs to target Britain, it was revealed yesterday.

Up to 240 crime networks have been identified in the country by Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency.

Its director Rob Wainwright said crooks are using low-cost airlines to target cities for one-day sprees.

Airport: Criminals are flying in and out of a country in just one day, Europol's director has said (file picture)

Romanian and Bulgarian gangs are thought responsible for 90 per cent of all European card-skimming crimes

Thieves, credit card fraudsters and pickpockets buy cheap tickets to fly in and out in just a few hours.

As a result police are almost powerless to identify those responsible.

An estimated 68,000 Romanians live in Britain, but there have been 28,000 arrests of Romanian people for serious offences in the past five years.

Mr Wainwright said his agency was facing ‘petty criminals operating across multiple jurisdictions’.

He added Romanian and Bulgarian offenders are responsible for 90 per cent of all card-skimming in Europe.

‘We have this travelling criminal gang phenomenon that has become much more prevalent in the last three or four years; gangs from Lithuania, gangs from Poland, gangs from Romania that are operating in 20 or more European countries,’ he added.



‘They fly on low-cost airlines, do a few hits in one city and get back in time for tea. It’s very difficult for local police to respond.’

Europol estimates that Romania’s organised crime gangs account for 6.7 per cent of such networks in Europe.

It claims this figure is out of proportion for a country with a population of 21million.

Experts think gangs have divided Europe into two, along a rough line from Gdansk in Poland to Lisbon in Portugal.

The main crimes being carried out by the travelling gangs are thought to be card-skimming and pickpocketing



Romanian gangs control the north, including Britain, Bulgarians the south.

Romanian criminals are specialists in pickpocketing and card-skimming, in which devices fixed to cash machines steal card details, they say.

The information, combined with a PIN recorded by a hidden camera, is used to drain a victim’s account.

Often data is used by accomplices in countries that do not require security chips, such as the US, Canada and Asia. This summer, police blamed Roma gipsies who were living rough on London’s Park Lane for a surge in begging, pickpocketing and shoplifting.



Police are working closely with colleagues in Romania and other countries to uncover suspects’ criminal records, and have won funding for eight Romanian and Polish officers to work as liaison officials.



In one case a shoplifter was found to be a notorious Romanian criminal wanted for more than 60 offences including kidnap and armed robbery.

'They fly on low-cost airlines, do a few hits in one city and get back in time for tea' Rob Wainwright, Europol director



Last month, the Home Affairs Committee heard that foreigners with convictions overseas can enter Britain, go on a crime spree and leave hours later without being caught.

The warning came as a report said staff shortages and a failing screening system have left Britain’s borders in chaos.

The National Audit Office said terrorists and offenders are slipping through the net.

Last year a family of pickpockets who built ‘palaces’ at home in Romania were jailed.

The Rostas family preyed on passengers on late-night trains out of London. They lived on benefits and stole hundreds of thousands from at least 185 victims over two years.

Government figures suggest the number of Romanians and Bulgarians in the UK has gone up by a third in the past year. The number working in the UK rose from 91,000 in April to June 2012 to 127,000 during the same period this year.

Both countries joined the EU in 2007, and from January 1 their citizens will have full rights to live and work here.

France’s foreign minister has called for Romanians and Bulgarians to be stopped from travelling freely. Laurent Fabius said there were security fears over crooks using the two impoverished countries as a way into the rest of the EU.

A high-profile trial in Nancy, eastern France, has heard how children of ten were in a ‘criminal army’ of Roma immigrants run by a 66-year-old woman.