A CONMAN who told a couple in their 70s that he was in the armed forces in order to get into their home and steal £10 was given a 14-month prison sentence.

Craig Wicks, 35, of no fixed address, admitted one charge of burglary at Oxford Crown Court on Friday.

Prosecutor Merril Hughes told the court Wicks knocked on the couple’s front door in James Street, off Cowley Road, Oxford, during the evening on January 4.

She said: “He falsely claimed to have run out of fuel, and said he was a sergeant in the Army and needed to make a phone call for a taxi to get back to Brize Norton.”

The couple let Wicks in to use the phone in the hallway, but then saw him leaning over a table in their living room, which had spare change on it.

After he left, they realised £10 was missing.

Miss Hughes added that the couple said the incident had made them more anxious.

She concluded by saying Wicks was a conman, prompting Judge Ian Pringle to remark: “And his record certainly backs that up.”

He went on: “In the last few years he has appeared at East Kent Magistrates’ Court for making false representations, and in November 2013 he appeared at Oxford Magistrates’ Court for further false representations.”

Wicks originally pleaded not guilty to the latest charge, but his defence barrister Stuart Matthews said he had used time in custody to think carefully, and had asked the judge for an indication of what sentence he might get if he pleaded guilty.

Judge Pringle told him 14 months and Wicks admitted the charge.

Sentencing him, Judge Pringle said: “It might only be £10, but I want you to understand when you go into elderly people’s houses you really unnerve them, and that never goes away.”

He told Wicks he would spend 14 months in prison, with time already served in remand counting against the sentence.

Judge Pringle also gave him three months to pay back the £10, and ordered him to pay a £100 victims’ surcharge.