A former salesman at a luxury tailor shop stole more than £50,000 from his workplace in order to support a drug habit.
Joshe Barnes, 32, of Butley Lanes, Macclesfield, had previously pleaded guilty to theft and fraud over the span of three years.
At a sentencing hearing at Manchester Crown Court, Barnes was slapped with a suspended sentence and told he must undertake unpaid community service.
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The court heard how Barnes had been employed as a salesman at Frank Rostron's Bespoke Shirtmakers, on Princess Street in Manchester city centre, from 2013 until 2019.
Between September 2016 and October 2019, Barnes was found to have taken almost £55,000 from customers as part of a ‘not very sophisticated’ fraud purporting to be for the sale of items.
Prosecutor David Farley told the court how the business operated on an online system that recorded customers’ measurements and payment details so that they could quickly ring up and order new items.
But Barnes began phoning up customers encouraging them to buy new shirts. He would then phone them up again to say the online system wasn’t working and asked them to transfer money directly to his bank account.
Over three years, it was estimated Barnes had carried out the fraudulent activity with around 80 customers - leading to around £55,450 taken from the business.
In 2019, a customer contacted the business to query the bank transfer and spoke to the business owner, Adam Dooley, who recognised the bank details as belonging to Barnes.
He was subsequently sacked from the business.
While most customers received their items, prosecutor Farley outlined that it was the business ‘that lost out’.
“It was almost bound to be discovered at some point,” the prosecutor told the court.
Judge Timothy Smith told Barnes he had ‘effectively siphoned off the proceeds for himself’ in what he said was ‘not a very sophisticated kind of fraud’.
Barnes, who had a previous conviction relating to theft in 2011, had gained the job via a friendship his father had with the business owner.
Defence barrister Peter Gilmour told the court that Barnes’ offending had been driven by a drug addiction - something that Barnes had since been able to successfully stop.
Mr Gilmour said: “This offence was driven by an addiction at that time to cocaine and cannabis. It was a desire to fund those addictions that led to this.
“He is now abstinent from both of those drugs, there is no lingering debt relating to those addictions and has distanced himself from the peer group that he associated with at the time.
“In the last few years, he has changed in the sense that he no longer has those addictions. There has been no offending since this offence occurred.”
Mr Gilmour told the court how Barnes was ‘genuinely remorseful’ and had a ‘very realistic prospect of rehabilitation’.
The defence barrister said Barnes had intended to work alongside his father in the near future on a mobile coffee van and had been able to change in the years since the offence ended.
Judge Smith told Barnes: “You adopted a practice whereby you fraudulently represented to customers that the payment mechanism was broken and not working.
“You gave those customers your own bank details, reporting to be those of Frank Rostron’s.
“In what is not a very sophisticated kind of fraud, you managed to divert the frauds that should have otherwise been paid to Frank Roston’s to yourself and your own bank account.”
Judge Smith said it had been a ‘significant’ amount of money spread over a period of time.
“You were in a position of trust and you clearly breached that,” the judge told Barnes.
“The true person losing as a consequence of this was Frank Roston’s.
“In substance, this was a theft from your employer.
“There was clearly some planning but I don't believe it was of a particularly sophisticated nature.”
Barnes was sentenced to a sentence of 16 months, suspended for two years, and required to carry out 180 hours of unpaid community service.
