Barista stole £4,000 from employer after charging customers on his own card machine
The incident took place at a Joe and theJuice (file pic)
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A barrister stole thousands from his cafe by taking payments from customers into his own personal account.
Brandon Leung used a £70 SumUp chip and pin device and spent months funnelling cash to his bank account.
The 26-year-old was only rumbled when a punter at Joe & The Juice complained after she was charged £94 instead of £42.10. Leung attempted to refund her with the reader before taking cash out of an ATM to give to her.
Leung, of Ladbroke Grove, West London, admitted fraud. He was fined £200 due to his lack of funds and was let off repaying the company despite his solicitor saying he had offered to.
Leung used a Sumup machine to fraud customers
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Leung, who had a past conviction for theft by an employee, admitted stealing £4,016.20 in an apology to the firm.
Prosecutor Ellen Alexander said: "He thought he could work out an agreement with the company to pay the money off. The offence was of a sophisticated nature. It was an abuse of position and power."
Ruta Mikailaite, mitigating, said Leung, who was £2,000 in debt, had been demoted after making an ad for his online business at work.
He told her he got the idea to use a chip-and-pin reader after seeing senior staff "use their own card machines" to take payments.
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The incident took place at a Joe and theJuice (file pic)
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Westminster JPs told Leung he was lucky to avoid a jail term. In addition to the fine, he was sentenced to a 12-month community order and 120 hours of unpaid work.
It comes after the Financial Ombudsman Service said fraud and scam complaints have hit a six-year high. It said that consumers lodged 8,734 complaints in April, May and June - the highest three-month total since it started collecting comparable data in 2018.
This represents a 43 per cent increase against the same period in 2023.
The quarterly figures are also the highest since the FOS started tracking data in 2018.
Ombudsman director for banking Pat Hurley said: "Fraudsters' methods are always evolving, and we continue to see that reflected in the complaints brought to our service."
More than half of the complaints (4,752) were linked to authorised push payment (APP) scams, when customers are tricked into approving an online bank transfer to a fraudster.