Polish thief poses as priest to con donations The man was arrested by police just after he had conducted mass in a parish near the central Polish town of Grojec where he and an accomplice had been operating for month raising funds for an alleged charity project in Ukraine. "Their arrival had been preceded by a telephone call to the rectory that assured the priest they had been assigned their task by the Archbishop of Warsaw so they did not arouse suspicion," said Alicja Sledziona, a police spokeswoman. They played their role so well that they were allowed to celebrate mass and even went carol singing. Along with other clerical duties the bogus priest also took confession. The net only closed in on the conman, referred to only as Jacek K. owing to privacy laws, and his colleague after the Warsaw Curie posted information on its website alerting priests to watch out for men pretending to be clerics. Jacek K. first came to the attention of the authorities a few years when, posing as a priest, he founded a charity he claimed would help disabled people. Gaining approval from the interior ministry and enlisting volunteers such as scouts it collected money in as many as 50 towns and raised perhaps as much as GBP 800,000, before the suspicion of prosecutors made the "priest" and the money disappear without trace in 2010. It was revealed that Jacek K. studied at a seminary for a year, and that this appears to have given him enough background in the workings of the Catholic Church and the priesthood to pass himself off as a man of the cloth. The television channel TVN 24 also reported that former colleagues of the conman said he was an expert in psychology who managed to get people to give him what he wanted. Police said that if found guilty of fraud Jacek K. could face eight years behind bars.