A THIEF who was part of a despicable three-man Romanian crime gang and robbed an 84-year-old lady at a bank machine in Port Glasgow has been jailed.

The vulnerable senior citizen was trying to lift money from an ATM in Princes Street in the town centre when she was preyed upon by twisted Piper Dumitri.

She was cruelly tricked by the 18-year-old into believing that the cash machine was broken and that he was there to fix it.

Instead, he had stolen hundreds of pounds from the unwitting pensioner’s account.

Now Dumitri – already serving time in a young offenders’ institute as a result of committing a similar crime – faces more than a year behind bars over his Inverclyde offence.

Details of his crime caused outrage in the community after he and two other men appeared in court in November to plead guilty to a spate of cash machine robberies.

The gang had admitted a charge of assault and robbery at an HSBC bank on Argyle Street in Glasgow by pushing a woman and stealing £200 from her on April 1 last year.

In the Port case, which happened on April 21, the 84-year-old local victim was trying to use the ATM, pictured, when a lurking Dumitri intervened and told her: “I’m here to fix this”.

He then touched the machine as though fixing it, while holding what the elderly lady thought was a tablet device. When she left the machine she dropped two store cards, which brazen Dumitri picked up and gave back to her.

She then reported the ‘broken machine’ to Lloyds TSB, only for staff to tell her that it was in fact working.

They then discovered that £200 had been taken from the customer’s account.

Dumitri and accomplices Felix Stoica, 19, Forin Geblescu, 18, sparked a UK-wide manhunt after carrying out a spate of robberies at ATM machines in Scotland.

In total they pocketed £1,100 but they were eventually caught when police south of the border – alerted after the robbers’ pictures were circulated nationwide – recognised them from an earlier robbery in Merseyside.

Stoica pled guilty to a further four charges of theft and Geblescu and Dumitri to three charges of stealing cash on April 21 and 22 at various Scottish bank machines.

Dumitri, who had acted as the ‘lookout’ in Glasgow city centre incident, also worked with Stoica to target a 51-year-old man in Stevenston on the same day as the incident in the Port.

Procurator fiscal depute John Bedford told Glasgow Sheriff Court: “Dumitri placed a wallet over the screen of the ATM and began talking in a foreign language.

“Stoica then approached the man and placed what appeared to be a map on the cash dispenser and then pressed £200 and removed the man’s money and they made off.”

The gang also targeted a machine in Newton Mearns the following day, stealing £300 from a 77-year-old OAP who was using it, with Dumitri again acting as watchman.

All three were seen on CCTV half an hour before the incident in an Audi car.

Police Scotland circulated a UK-wide bulletin to try and identify the teenagers - leading to police in Manchester and Wirral recognising them.

As Dumitri and his teenage accomplices appeared in court yesterday, Sheriff Daniel Scullion said they would each be detained for 14 months, reduced from 21 months for their crimes.