Episode 1 Thief Trackers

According to police figures,

more than 3,500 theft incidents are recorded every day in the UK.

They stole part of my life.

But have you ever wondered what happens to our belongings

when they're stolen?

Thief Trackers tells the story of where they go.

We're hiding satellite tracking devices inside a range

of desirable everyday items, like cameras,

smartphones and bicycles, to trace the looters' footsteps.

The thieves may think they've got away with it,

but we are tracking their every move.

With secret filming, CCTV and police raid footage,

we'll get an insight into the criminal mind-set

and uncover the unseen journey that our treasured possessions take

when they're stolen.

Today we're on the trail of petty thieves who think nothing of stealing

charity donations from right outside the shop.

It's a feeding frenzy, they don't care who's watching them.

It's particularly shocking taking it from a charity shop.

Lancashire cricketers team up with a police dog

to bowl out a sneaky phone thief -

modern tracking technology meets old-school policing.

Looking back, it was one of the funniest

45 minutes, I think, of my life.

And cutting-edge technology puts the police in the picture

when a robbery victim tracks down a stolen laptop.

We had information on the network they were logged into.

We even had an approximate address, based on their IP address.

The 10,500 charity shops across the UK depend on the generosity

of the general public for donations,

raising around £219 million for good causes every year.

Many people drop off their donations in the evening

because they're either at work or just too busy to get to the shop

during opening hours, so they leave their bags outside on the pavement.

However, there is a growing and disturbing trend

that we want to highlight.

These items are being stolen right from the charities' doorsteps.

Across the country, local newspapers are highlighting this story.

From Derbyshire, to Devon, to Scotland,

there have been increasing numbers of incidents reported.

The sad truth is that it's a criminal trend

becoming all too prevalent.

Keith Farquharson, a former Met Police inspector,

is assisting us with our inquiries.

This is quite a common crime and people that do it would see it

as a victimless crime, but quite honestly, it isn't.

It is against the law, it is theft and the owner is still

the person who placed the bag until the charity shop take it over.

One such victim of this heartless thieving is the Mind charity shop

in the south London Borough of Wandsworth.

Met Police figures show that this area is one of the top four

London boroughs for handling stolen goods, with over 1,000 items

reported during the year 2014.

The people that run the charity shop behind me have informed us that

they've been subject to quite a large number of thefts from bags

that have been placed overnight by members of the public

donating to the shop.

Mona has worked in the shop for 20 years - the last 16 as manager.

Not only is she angered by the thieving, but also the mess

left behind once the vultures have finished rummaging through the bags.

They're usually ripped open, they're thrown all over the floor

and it seems to be that they're looking for the goods,

things they can use, and the others are just thrown around.

And I have to clean up other messes as well.

And it doesn't end there.

Outside the shop is a textile bank.

People who live opposite here tell me that, during the night,

people have been in it with hooks and trying to get it out.

And there was one incident as well where there was a man in there

and he couldn't get back out again.

So we needed to break the lock to try to get him.

He was then arrested.

Time for Thief Trackers to go undercover to monitor the extent

of this distasteful charity-thieving.

We put together a bag of everyday items and wrote out a tag,

making it clear that this bag is intended for the charity.

5pm and it's after closing time at the shop.

Just before 7pm, the Thief Trackers' team drop off our charity donation.

Shortly after, more kind-hearted folk leave their own donations.

In the two hours since the shop shut,

look how much has been left outside by donors.

How many of these bags will survive the night until the shop opens again?

It's almost 7.15pm.

Here's someone stopping for a look.

She's having a good nose in the bags.

But by the look of her trainers, she can't be short of a bob or two.

She's searched through the open bags, but not touched our sealed bag.

Wow, look at that!

This thief has pinched a whole bagful of charity donations.

45 minutes have gone and there's been no further thieving.

Hang on, there's someone else with a bag. Maybe she's donating.

Or maybe not.

She likes the look of that bag.

Oh, and that one, too!

That's two bags of charity stock she's pinched

without even looking to see what's inside.

Seconds later...

Hey! Mind our camera!

He's having a good look at our bag.

It looks like he's got an accomplice.

Unbelievable.

Mind is a charity that raises money

for some of the most vulnerable people in our society,

but these two have absolutely no thought for the needy

who might benefit from the funds that these goods would have raised.

He's ripped our bag open to have a good old rummage.

Oh, he likes the handbag!

Incredible, in one minute they've been through absolutely everything.

He's found a coat now.

But they can't decide whether they like it or not.

Obviously not,

because they've dropped it into the textile bank.

Clearly it's not valuable enough to tempt them.

They like this handbag, though, and that's them done.

It was a big laugh for those two, but this kind of theft occurs

outside of this one shop almost every night of the week.

That's thousands of pounds a year in lost takings

that could help those in need.

Later on Thief Trackers, we play back our evidence of the thieving.

People just come and take things straight away.

And it's time for our own donation - with a tracker inside it.

We're soon on the trail of a scavenging thief.

The GPS showed that it was in this block at around about 6.10 at night.

High-value electronic items can be a prime target for thieves

looking to make a swift return on their criminal activity.

There were almost 300,000 computer equipment thefts

in the UK during the year to March 2014.

But in Elephant & Castle, south London,

the victims are starting to fight back,

turning detectives and mounting their own covert surveillance operation.

This fella struggling to hang up a picture is Jordan

and he runs a printing shop. That's Josh and Amy - they work here, too.

We're a large format printing business.

We print things that are generally quite big,

like posters, roller banners, canvases

and we also have a website where our orders are placed by customers.

Having a computer, and the laptop in particular,

is critical to what we do, really.

But all their fancy Dan computers make them an ideal target

for a bit of light-fingered skulduggery.

The day that the theft occurred

started like pretty much every other day.

I think Josh had popped out to grab his lunch

and Amy was in the shop on her own.

She had a customer on the phone and then she noticed two guys

who came into the shop and just started talking at her, really.

Unfortunately, I was only focusing on one gentleman that was in there.

You're far too polite, Amy.

There's other ways to describe these crooks,

but gentleman isn't one of them, considering what they're about to do.

Whilst I was focusing and also on the phone,

the other gentleman went behind me and took the laptop.

And there goes the gentleman thief...

and your laptop!

We didn't initially realise that the laptop had been stolen,

actually, and it wasn't until Josh came back with his lunch.

He expected to find his laptop on his desk

and started questioning where it was.

We'd spent about half an hour trying to look for it.

We thought we'd misplaced it ourselves.

It started to dawn on us that, in fact, somebody had taken it

from right under our noses, basically.

It's just general shock and disbelief

that that actually happened in the middle of the day.

My first feeling was, "Oh, my God, how do we get this back,

"how do you rectify this?"

Because they'd been turned over by burglars in the past, they'd taken

the precaution of fitting their laptops with tracking software.

There are various types available, but they use one called Hidden,

developed by Toby here, who's going to tell us what it does.

Hidden remains dormant on your laptop when it's installed

until it's stolen, at which point you can activate tracking online

and Hidden will start to take screenshots of the computer.

It will report its location, just trying to collect as much evidence

as you can to help the police retrieve what's been stolen.

Having called the police,

they activated the tracker online by marking the laptop as stolen.

The invisible software then locks the owner's account,

preventing access to personal data.

You also need to set up a guest account that the people

who have the computer can log into, they can use it,

and potentially give away a bit of information about their identity

and who they are and where they are.

It wasn't until maybe four or five days after the laptop

had been stolen, actually, that we got a report and I was out

and about at the time and I got an e-mail on my phone saying,

"Receipt from tracking data." I was like, great.

So I rushed back to the office,

logged in, had a look at what we had and we had screenshots

from what they'd been doing on the computer,

we had information on the network they were logged into,

and we even had an approximate address based on their IP address,

which was an address in east London.

It seemed as if they'd hit the jackpot,

but the data wasn't detailed enough for the boys in blue.

They said, "Well, look, until we've got a precise address,

"we can't go knocking on or kicking in doors to retrieve it."

So we had a range and it was just a kind of waiting game

from then, really.

So in the meantime, Jordan and his team took advantage

of another surprising function within the tracking software.

It controls the laptop's onboard camera,

taking photos of whoever is using the device.

Say cheese!

So we quickly ascertained from their Facebook page that the guys who had

it were Romanian, they were logged in, they were speaking Romanian.

They watched a four or five hour wedding video from Romania.

It became a bit like an obsession, really, it was quite, you know,

sort of voyeuristic, really.

Well, everyone's got to have a hobby.

Just out of interest, what websites were they looking at?

All above board, thankfully.

Oops, nothing to see here!

Alone at last, enjoying the internet.

With the app, you can actually control the computer

remotely as well.

Brilliant! This sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

We're thinking, if we never get their address,

we'll just bombard them with annoying YouTube videos

and just turn the volume right up and play a really annoying pop song

at them, play it ten times over on repeat just to annoy them.

Justin Bieber at full volume 24/7...

that's enough to make anyone crack!

It was a Sunday afternoon,

I was just logged on out of interest to see what they were up to

and one of the guys was translating a bail letter.

Just a bit ironic, really.

And it was obviously in English,

they were translating it to Romanian.

They fired up Google Translate and we had three or four screenshots,

including an image from the built-in camera,

of the guy holding the bail letter while he translated it to his friend

and it had, you know, house number, postcode, the lot.

That's not the cleverest of moves.

What's Romanian for, "You're nicked"?

I couldn't really believe my eyes. I was like, this is what we needed.

Called the police, they popped over to east London, knocked on the door.

They first denied they had any knowledge of a laptop.

They showed them an iPad with some screenshots taken from the computer,

said, "I think you do have it,

"because you look awfully like this guy,"

and they gave up, willingly gave a statement to the police

by all accounts saying, you know,

"This is where we bought it, from a market in East Ham,"

and what have you. And I suppose, you know, you sort of feel sorry

for them cos they've been relieved of whatever cash in buying this,

and the only person that really won was the guy who came in the shop,

grabbed it and flogged it to them on the cheap.

They've now installed tracking software on all their computers

and are keeping a beady eye out at lunchtime for would-be villains.

Prevention is better than a cure, we found,

so make sure you just keep an eye on your things.

If they're easily stolen, put them away.

And buyer beware, if you've bought a cheap laptop down the market,

be sure you keep your flat tidy.

You never know who's watching.

Tracking stolen goods is no easy task.

At Thief Trackers,

we're investigating the theft of charity donations.

So far, we've caught robbers on camera lifting bag-loads of goods

from outside this Mind charity shop in south London.

The next day, we returned to show Mona, the shop's manager,

the video from our night's filming.

It's not even there very long, somebody passes and takes the bag!

And it makes me really quite angry to see that.

I see how much stuff people just put there,

which I could use in the shop for the charity, and people just...

Yeah, just come and take it.

That's all the mess they're making now,

they're going right through it, looking at everything.

It takes such a long time in the morning for me to clean that up.

If it's on the floor and if it's raining or it's dirty, I can't even

get rags for it, because it's so dirty, the ragman wouldn't take it.

Once Mona has cleared up the mess from an evening's scavenging,

it costs the charity money to have it taken away.

If people donated and it's been thrown in the street,

they don't donate money to us,

they're actually making us pay money out for this to be collected.

Having seen the extent of the thieving, we want to find out

where these donations end up once they're stolen,

an impossible task unless your item has a GPS tracker like this one.

It has a small battery that can last for up to two weeks,

depending on how many signals the tracker sends.

This tracking device can come up with a series of numbers that

describes its position.

Once you've got those numbers, you can plot the position

of the device on a map and you can display that on a computer screen.

How does it do that?

It does that using GPS, the Global Positioning System.

And the core of that technology is the ability of this device

to measure the range from here to orbiting satellites.

Those satellites could be 20,000km away.

Not all charity shops accept electrical items, but this one does.

We're fitting our tracker into a DVD player.

With the tracker secured, we bag up our player, label it clearly

as a charity donation and drop it off outside the shop.

It's not even six o'clock in the evening

and our first rummager arrives

for a good sift through our bags.

He's had a good look, but sees nothing that takes his fancy,

leaving the items strewn on the ground.

It's not long before someone else turns up

for a root around in our charity bag.

Takes a good look at the clothing, but not interested.

There's more for the clothing bank.

Here comes another curious customer...

And look at that, he's straight in there,

no honour amongst thieves as he grabs the DVD player.

You can see the silver bay showing up under his arm.

And there he goes, he's off.

And now we can pick him up with the tracker.

The tracker shows the thief moving slowly around the corner,

into Union Road, where the signal comes to a stop,

not even five minutes' walk away from where it was stolen.

Our expert Keith is soon on the trail.

The shop closes at approximately 5.30pm most days of the week

and the GPS tracking showed that the item was actually taken

at just after 6pm.

The GPS showed that it was in this block

at around about 6.10pm at night,

therefore confirming that the thief or whoever did take it

was living close to the actual shop itself.

Once inside a building,

the tracker can only report its last-known position.

So if the tracking device is inside a building,

then its ability to make measurements to the GPS satellites

is a bit degraded, so you might be able to work out the device

is inside a particular building, but you wouldn't be able to figure out

from the GPS data exactly which room it's in.

We didn't let that deter us

and turned to more conventional tracking methods.

We went out on foot to leaflet the area and knock on doors

to try and locate our DVD player and the thief,

to find out why he felt the need to steal from charity.

We spoke to several residents and, sure enough,

having seen a picture of our thief, neighbours pointed out his address.

We left messages for him to contact us,

but it's no surprise that, so far, we've had no response.

It's morally reprehensible,

it's the same as taking a charity collection box, if you like.

You can equate it to exactly the same.

Donate when we're open to make absolutely sure

we get the stuff you are donating and not just leave it outside

to be stolen or sold or just destroyed.

If the authorities want to take a look at our video evidence,

they're welcome to contact us.

Not all thieves operate in such a casual and opportunistic fashion.

Others are more devious and calculating,

as in our next case in Lancashire in the North West of England.

Around five miles out of Blackburn lies the small town of Oswaldtwistle.

This is the story of a thief who had the barefaced cheek

to steal from a cricket club dressing room during a match.

The way he did it was really devious.

It looks like a seasoned pro.

He was chased across town by both teams...

We looked a bit like Keystone Cops, I think.

..and eventually caught by a combination

of mobile tracking technology...

and man's best friend.

It's an archetypal English summer - the sound of leather on willow,

polite applause from the pavilion...

oh, and the rain.

We play for Haslingden Cricket Club,

we're a cricket team in the Lancashire league, which is

one of the most prestigious leagues in the North West.

Even on the gloomiest day, the genteel game of cricket

seems far removed from the world of crime,

but thieves can strike anywhere, any time.

One Sunday in June 2014, that's exactly what happened here,

as a sneak thief hatched a plan to riffle through the dressing rooms.

There'll be obviously mobile phones, wallets,

keys for cars, etc, that were parked on the ground.

Obviously all our cricket gear, as well.

Thousands of pounds' worth of cricket equipment.

It's our little sanctuary, as such, for seven hours of the day.

A criminal was about to step over the boundary.

He knew enough about the game to pick the right moment to strike.

If you're fielding, then obviously all 11 players come out

onto the field at the same time,

leave all your belongings in the dressing room.

As the changing rooms were in constant use,

they were rarely locked and besides, the team never imagined

their countryside pavilion would be a target.

You trust everyone obviously around the cricket club and that,

so you don't expect anything of it.

But the one thing this crook hadn't banked on

was the good old English weather.

And as the rain came down, the players came off.

So as we were walking off, one of the opposition batsmen

in full batting gear and spikes

was running up the side of the ground up there.

So I kind of made a pass-away comment, saying,

"Why're you warming up? We're coming off for rain anyway."

And he said, "No, no, no, I think somebody's just been

"in your dressing room and stolen some phones."

Players from both sides immediately tried to find the suspect.

We went up to the main road to see if we could see anybody

and there was nothing untoward at that moment in time.

But in the interim, all the other players had gone back

in the dressing rooms and checked their pockets

for their mobile phones, the vast majority of which were missing.

Before the rain had interrupted him, it seems the cunning phone snatcher

had collected a tidy haul by mingling in with the watching crowd.

He actually sat outside our dressing room,

pretended to be one of our club officials.

When we took a wicket or bowled a good ball,

he sort of clapped and cheered and so the opposition thought

he was just a member of our kind of backroom staff, so to speak.

Then he kept milling in and out of the dressing room

and he did it at a couple of times apparently, so he went in,

came back and sat in his place, and then he went into the bar and

waved at people in the bar, so it looked like he actually knew people.

And then he's carried on walking down the ground,

but fortunately one of the opposition had enough nous

to think that something was slightly untoward.

The cheek of it! But although the thief gave them the slip,

he was batting on a sticky wicket.

Foolishly, he'd stolen mobile phones

that can be tracked by GPS technology.

Fortunately, somebody had the Find My iPhone app on his phone.

We keyed in the details of one of the phones that was missing.

And then obviously we got a live GPS signal

and we could track the phone from there.

There was no kind of consensus decision or whatever,

we just all decided at that point we were going to chase him.

Usually in a situation like this, the best thing to do is to call

the police rather than tackle a thief yourself.

The first couple of updates showed him running to the top of a hill,

so it was kind of almost like Benny Hill at one point

where four or five of us were running up to the top of this hill,

refreshed the app and then it turned out

that he'd run back down the hill.

Then we all ran back down the hill to try and find where he was.

Looking back, it was one of the funniest 45 minutes,

I think, of my life.

The players knew the thief was nearby,

but needed help to pinpoint his exact location.

Time now for the professionals to join this extraordinary chase.

A colleague of mine from the traffic department

had been stopped by a member of the public, who told them

that they'd had mobile phones stolen.

The offender was believed to be running across fields

in order to make his escape.

As a dog handler, this is bread and butter stuff.

So I shouted up to say that I would attend also.

The hunt was on, as modern GPS technology gave way to

a traditional sniffer dog.

Come on, let's go!

'When I got there, I discovered that there was a whole team'

of cricket players in full cricket whites running around

the streets, making quite a racket.

It was quite funny, really, it was a bit like a Monty Python sketch.

They could obviously find the general area of where the criminal

was hiding, but they couldn't pinpoint his location.

So what can a dog do that a GPS tracker can't?

Well, a dog's sense of smell

is roughly 50 times more acute than a human's.

Picking up a criminal's scent is a walk in the park.

The cricket team said, "He's here somewhere -

"he has to be here somewhere,

"the phones are giving off their location in this area."

So I went into the field and worked my way back towards the road,

and obviously that's where Sirius has picked up his scent,

become interested in the area

and started barking.

That's when the guy, our suspect,

has obviously been spooked by the dog,

run out of the wooded area

and straight into the arms of the cricket guys.

And one of the cricketers leading the chase

was an off-duty police officer.

At that point, he kind of gave himself away

by turning and running,

which obviously was like a red rag to a bull to a police officer,

because he immediately hightailed it after him,

jumped over a fence into some nettles

and pushed the villain down to the floor

and managed to drag his arm behind his back and place him under arrest.

That was the end of his innings.

And there was a nasty sting in the tail.

He was covered head to toe in nettles,

so bad that he actually needed medical treatment

once we got him into custody,

so he was pretty quiet when we found him.

Their joy at having knocked the thief for six was short-lived

when they realised he didn't have the phones on him.

He was protesting innocence, saying,

"No, I've not taken any phones,

"I don't know what you're talking about."

This remarkable story didn't end there.

The cricketers once again turned to modern technology

and used a tracking app to send a signal to one of the missing phones.

They used a ping noise locator,

which emitted a regular rhythmic noise.

Bearing in mind a dog can hear four times the distance of a human,

it was time for Sirius to join in the hunt again.

We put Sirius into the area where these phones were,

where the noise was being emitted,

and he discovered where they were hiding.

Thankfully, Sirius managed to track down all 12 of the missing phones.

Good boy - back in your basket!

So he could do nothing but hold his hands up and admit it.

The cricketers had finally run their man out,

and their daring deeds even bowled over social media.

Yeah, we were a Twitter phenomenon!

For about five or six days.

If it didn't all work out and the things had been stolen

I don't think it would have had the same reaction,

but because it all worked out in the end,

it was something to laugh and joke about and it were all good fun.

Thanks to a combination of modern tracking technology

and a dog's amazing senses,

the phone-snatcher got six months.

Howzat for a result?