Home » Business Continuity » Supply Chain

Shoplifting and Organized Retail Crime: Mall Rats

John Talamo of The Limited knows exactly how profitable shoplifting can be. He explains the fight against organized retail crime.

That's our goal. We have one case we're working on where our team has apprehended an individual in five different states. He has warrants out for his arrest in five different states. This individual will have two of everything—two vans, two boosters. In Rhode Island, we apprehended his crew but only got one van. The other van got away. When two boosters go in opposite directions, depending on your manpower you can only go after one of them.

Our strategy is based on data analysis and intelligence. Once we've identified a location that has been frequented by these professional boosters, when our team gets to the mall, our ORC manager will contact mall security and say, "We're going to be here today working the mall." They've already established a relationship with security and the police department in these areas. Then they'll start conducting surveillance. Someone will be in the parking lot looking for somebody coming back and forth to a van, dropping product. If we see that, we'll pick up surveillance of that person back to the mall. Also they'll do surveillance of our stores. We usually have four stores in a mall—Victoria's Secret, Express, Limited, Bath & Body Works, sometimes White Barn Candle Company. Once they identify a crew that starts to steal from our stores, what they do is continue the surveillance. They don't apprehend the mule. The team leader will call our local police contact and say, "OK, we have identified a professional crew stealing from our stores. We've observed them stealing the product; we've followed them out to the vehicle. This is what the vehicle looks like, and this is the plate number." They'll continue the surveillance for as long as the crew works the mall.

How do you decide what malls you're going to do surveillance at, and when?

We have an incident reporting package, and I've created an organized retail crime section in it. In our company, we consider any theft where $500 of merchandise is stolen an ORC theft. That gets called in and goes into our database. We collect all the necessary data. What day of the week was it? Where did it happen? Mall, brand, date, time and method of operation. We have a few years' worth of data. We know that we usually don't experience any ORC thefts prior to noon or 1 p.m. Usually Mondays and Tuesdays are very quiet. Wednesday starts to pick up. It builds Thursday and Friday, and then peaks on Saturday.