"Deception" was a legal term of art used in the definition of statutory offences in England and Wales and Northern Ireland.
The defendant continued to sit quietly, lulling the waiters into believing payment would be made in due course, and thereby obtained the opportunity to leave without paying.
This reasoning has also been applied to the offence of obtaining a service by deception, contrary to section 1 of the Theft Act 1978.
Deception offences include situations where the defendant represents that counterfeited goods are genuine items, or misrepresents their identity (e.g., R v Barnard,[11] where the defendant represented that he was a student to an Oxford bookshop to qualify for their scheme of discounting books to students), or asserts that an envelope contains money.
In Director of Public Prosecutions v Ray,[12] the defendant who sits in a restaurant impliedly represents that they intend to pay for the meal.
Deception offences are separately defined to avoid any problems that might arise when the "victim" consents to the taking.
Sections 2(1) and (2) of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 provide a definition of deception.