Professional' beggars earning up to £200 a night to supplement their day jobs

The sight of a person in tatty clothes begging on the street is enough to elicit money from many well-meaning passers-by.

But, it was claimed last night, some 'beggars' could be office workers with homes who are topping up their salaries by earning £200 a night from donations.

Employees are said to be returning from their day jobs and dressing up in rags to spend their evenings pocketing spare change.

One office worker with a 9 to 5 job said she planned to use the money earned by begging outside cash points and shops to pay for a new kitchen in her flat. 

Last night, police warned that growing numbers of people were turning to professional begging to stave off the recession by earning hundreds of pounds tax-free a night.

Officers in Leicester have launched a crackdown after discovering that none of the 20 beggars they had cautioned in the last fortnight was homeless.

Sergeant Adrian Underwood said some beggars could earn up to £200 on a Friday or Saturday night.

If they netted this amount twice every weekend, they could earn as much as £21,000 a year on top of their normal salary 'We have intelligence-there is a woman who is begging because she wants a new kitchen for her flat,' said Sergeant Underwood.

'A lot of well-intentioned people see someone begging and think they are deserving causes. 

Second income: Some beggars are making a profession of it

'Would they give them money if they knew that person had just come out of a flat, was on benefits and had food in the larder?'

Previously Leicestershire Police announced a 'three strikes and you're out' approach after begging emerged as a major concern for people living, working and shopping in the city.

Beggars are given a formal warning and their details taken by officers. If they are seen again, a second warning is issued and if caught a third time, they can be arrested and prosecuted.

Toni Soni, the head of hostel services at Leicester council, said joint operations with the police have found no beggars to be homeless.

'There are people who are actually professional beggars who are doing it to make a living,' he said.

'If we did find they were rough sleepers, we would try to engage them in our support services.'

Beggars in London can earn up to £300 a day figures from Westminster council revealed in 2007.

The Tory-run authority urged people to give money to homeless charities rather than beggars.

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Wired Space Photo of the Day

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Supermassive Black Hole Jets

This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array (pink).

This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.

The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet.

Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is from the stars in the galaxy.

The bright spots in X-ray and radio emission on the outer edges of the galaxy, near the ends of the jets, are caused by extremely high energy electrons following curved paths around magnetic field lines. They show where a jet generated by the black hole has plowed into clumps of material in the galaxy. Much of the energy of the jet goes into heating the gas in these clumps, and some of it goes into dragging cool gas along the direction of the jet. Both the heating and the dragging can limit the fuel supply for the supermassive black hole, leading to temporary starvation and stopping its growth. This feedback process is thought to cause the observed correlation between the mass of the supermassive black hole and the combined mass of the stars in the central region or bulge of a galaxy.

These results were reported in two different papers. The first, which concentrated on the effects of the jets on the galaxy, is available online and was published in the May 10, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. It is led by Aneta Siemiginowska from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA and the co-authors are Lukasz Stawarz, from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Yoshinodai, Japan; Teddy Cheung from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC; Thomas Aldcroft from CfA; Jill Bechtold from University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ; Douglas Burke from CfA; Daniel Evans from CfA; Joanna Holt from Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands; Marek Jamrozy from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland; and Giulia Migliori from CfA. The second, which concentrated on the supermassive black hole, is available online and was published in the October 20, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. It is led by Malgorzata Sobolewska from CfA, and the co-authors are Aneta Siemiginowska, Giulia Migliori, Lukasz Stawarz, Marek Jamrozy, Daniel Evans, and Teddy Cheung.