Paris "cake burglar" caught

It's the end of the line for the so-called "cake burglar".

(From Wikipedia, author - Algont)

Paris police have arrested and charged a 64-year-old man who had, for over a year, been preying on elderly people in the northern suburbs of the capital.

No he didn't get his nickname because he had been stealing their cakes - just in case that was what you were thinking.

Instead he was robbing them of their bank cards after having offered them cakes and pastries laced with sedatives.

According to RTL radio the methods he employed to steal from his victims, aged from 75 to 88, had always been the same.

He befriended them in local shops or on the street, engaged them in conversation and gained their confidence enough to get himself invited to their homes.

When he turned up it was never empty handed but, as RTL reports, "Always with a French pastry or a cake."

But the 64-year-old was no social do-gooder, because the cakes were spiked with Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and after getting his victims to reveal their personal identification numbers and ensuring they had fallen asleep, he would steal their bank cards and use them to withdraw cash.

And that, according to Le Parisien, was how he managed to commit almost 20 robberies dating back to 2009.

The police, the paper reports, hadn't wanted to alarm elderly people living in the area but had "warned them to be vigilant".

Their inquiries investigations had been made more difficult apparently by the "sometimes unreliable descriptions" provided by the victims.

In the end though they were able to identify the man after they had managed to discover where he had been buying the cakes.