Hundreds of scouts in York have seen their fundraising efforts take a battering after the bizarre theft of thirteen billboards.
Members of Dringhouse Scout group have held a house-to-house recycling collection for the past fifteen years. The scouts are paid £40 from City of York Council and a local skip hire firm for every tonne of paper collected.
As per usual, the scouts placed their billboards along Tadcaster Road, three days in advance, to remind residents of the collection.
However, over the weekend, all but three of the sixteen notices mysteriously disappeared. This led to a much lower percentage of residents remembering about the collection, and the Scouts missed out on around £200 earnings as a result.
Ann Iveson, Secretary, said: “I’m so angry. It’s not just the Scouts who have missed out, the people of Dringhouses rely on us to pick their paper up. We’re trying to do something good for the community and this is how we are repaid. It is so frustrating.
Normally we fill a skip with 10 to 12 tonnes of paper, but on Saturday it was barely half full. We’re also going to pay for a new set of boards, which will cost about another £200. That is really annoying because we had only just bought a new set of boards after the old ones got worn out.”
Ms Iveson added: “I’ve no idea why they did it. We can’t think why anybody would want our boards and it would have been a very odd prank. There is a worry that whoever has them might use them for nefarious purposes because they have the official Scout emblem on them. They might pretend they are collecting money for the Scouts.”
