Home Secretary Priti Patel has announced plans to bar European crooks from entering Britain.
Hopefully that will mean the likes of Remus Turturica will not darken our shores again.
The professional thief from Romania likes to shoulder surf people at cashpoints to see their PIN, and then steal the card. He was jailed for seven months in 2016 and deported, then returned and in eight days was offending again.
Worcester Crown Court heard last week how he took more than £9,600 from a shopper’s bank account after stealing her bank card in a supermarket car park in Hereford.
She had used two cards at a cashpoint and was then distracted by Turturica, who asked for directions to the local hospital.
Turturica, 62, admitted theft and fraud charges and was jailed for 30 months. He has
similar convictions in France, Spain and Austria.
Accomplice 37-year-old Marius Nitu, also from Romania, was jailed for nine months for fraud.
After getting the cards the pair used them in stores and at cashpoints across three counties, wearing baseball caps to try to avoid being identifitied.
Detective Constable Sarah Carroll of West Mercia Police said: "The damage these two men have done is not just financial but emotional too.
"The victim suffered greatly after the theft whereby they used the coronavirus pandemic to engage with the her and play on her compassion.
"The two men sole nearly £10,000 pounds from her accounts in a very short space of time and are clearly professional criminals looking to steal and defraud vulnerable people and I welcome the sentence passed down to them."
Under European Union rules on freedom of movement, immigration officials can only block entry to the most serious criminals who pose a “a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society”.
New powers giving border staff wider scope for banning entry to the UK will come into force on January 1.
Ms Patel said: “For too long, EU rules have forced us to allow dangerous foreign criminals, who abuse our values and threaten our way of life, onto our streets.
"The UK will be safer thanks to firmer and fairer border controls where foreign criminals regardless of nationality will be subject to the same criminality rules."
