The criminal gangs behind the rise in shoplifting

‘She was dressing half of Brixton at one time.’ A former plumber from south London is recalling the pretty, well-groomed shoplifter of his youth. Expensively dressed, her favourite place to target was Selfridges. ‘I don’t know how she did it but she got everything. You put in an order and she’d get it. Those days I had silk boxer shorts to give away,’ he sighs. ‘But then her son got murdered and she died shortly after of a broken heart.’

Shoplifting is no longer a one-woman show. Light-fingered mothers have been replaced by organised criminals, trafficking children and teenage girls from eastern Europe to steal from British shops. Children are a key part of their strategy because they are too young to be charged. Police forces in Lancashire, Merseyside and South Yorkshire have seen five-year-olds used.

This new breed of shoplifter has led to an explosion in the number of thefts, from 1.1 million to 5.6 million in just a year. British retailers now suffer a staggering 600 thefts an hour. Dame Sharon White, the chair of the John Lewis Partnership, has said that last year the company faced a £12 million increase in shoplifting. ‘In the last year we have moved on from “I’m going to put an extra six eggs in my basket, I haven’t paid for them but actually my family’s struggling” to organised crime gangs shoplifting to order in a way I find profoundly shocking.’

One Romanian gang, the Morrisons Marauders, used foil-lined bags to steal at least £65,000 worth of goods from Morrisons supermarkets across Britain. They picked goods they could sell on quickly for big profits, targeting alcohol, cosmetics, ink cartridges and electric toothbrush heads.