Episode 10 Thief Trackers

According to police figures more than 3,500

theft incidents are reported 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.

SIREN BLARES

We're hiding satellite tracking devices inside a range of

desirable every day items like cameras, smartphones and bicycles

to trace the looters' footsteps.

The thieves think they've got away with it but we're tracking

their every move.

With secret filming, CCTV and police raid footage...

Police officers with a search warrant - open the door.

..we'll get an insight into the criminal mindset and uncover the

unseen journeys that our treasured possessions take when they're stolen

Today, we're on the trail of a gang of brazen bike thieves.

They have no idea we're tracing their steps with a GPS tracker.

It's in broad daylight, he doesn't care who's watching him.

It's quite shocking.

Plus, police put a stop to international car smuggling

down at the dockside.

That isn't what I would expect to see from Land Rover,

so that suggests to me this could well be a stolen vehicle.

And one woman mounts her own covert surveillance operation to

track down a crafty burglar!

Cycling is on the increase in Britain,

with more and more of us taking to two wheels.

We pedalled a massive 3.25 billion miles in 2014!

Perhaps it's no surprise that a significant number of the

country's bicycle thefts, almost 20%, occur in London.

We want to find out where these stolen bikes go and former

Metropolitan Police inspector Keith Farquharson is helping us.

We chose to run our scenario in the south-west London borough

of Wandsworth, one of the top three boroughs in London for cycle crime.

This borough recorded almost 1,400 cycle thefts in 2014.

Since only 5% of victims ever see their bicycles again,

the chances of recovering them are extremely slim...

..unless the bicycle has been fitted with a GPS tracker like this.

So this is a tracking device,

and that means that the device is able to figure out its location.

It does that by using the global positioning system

and the core of that technology is the ability of this device to

measure the range from this device to orbiting satellites.

Once you've got those numbers you can plot the position of this

device on a map.

We're hiding our tracker inside the saddle. It'll still give out

a strong signal, even with someone sat on it!

With the tracker fitted,

the team head to a quiet spot in the target area.

They chain up the bike with a heavy-duty lock.

And from the data we can see the tracker is live.

The team move our vehicles to a discreet vantage point.

They've hidden three cameras to catch the action.

Now, we don't want to confront any thieves,

we just want to see where property goes once it's stolen.

All we can do now is sit back and observe.

It's been a while and there hasn't been any interest to speak of.

He's having a quick look.

Hello! He wants an even closer look!

No, it seems his mate's talked him out of it.

A little later...

..look closely at these three lads cycling past.

They've spotted our bike and are checking it out.

They cycle off but it's not long before they're back, with this

guy on the Boris bike. It appears they're sussing out the area.

One lad has dismounted to take a closer look.

It seems they're discussing their next move.

We've chosen a sturdy lock so they'll have to show real

criminal intent to prise the bike from the railings.

This guy has other plans

But his accomplice doesn't want to be hasty,

seems he wants the whole bike.

Look, if you go like this, look I'm sharing my opinion,

if you go like this, stamp on it...

They're testing the strength of the lock.

But there are still too many people around to try and steal it.

Charming! Shall we add litter lout to his list of misdemeanours?

Quite by chance the nearby vehicles leave,

so this could be their moment to strike.

There they go!

They unscrew the wheel nuts

while the other two gang members keep lookout.

In the blink of an eye, one wheel is off...

..and there goes the other.

Then the thieves take off, leaving the wheel-less frame dangling

from the railings.

As a bike frame can be worth hundreds of pounds,

considerably more than the wheels, we decided to sit tight in case

the bike-jackers returned.

Plus, our tracker is still inside the saddle.

It's interesting that since it's lost its wheels,

the bike frame seems to be attracting more attention.

A little while later and one of the thieves is back again.

It seems he's brought someone else with him this time.

Maybe they've come for the rest of the bike?

He's not leaving without that frame!

There you go, two tugs and it's off.

It's in broad daylight, he doesn't care who's watching him.

It's quite shocking.

The thieves apparently have all of our bike.

So we can now let the tracker do its job.

We can see from the signal that the thieves don't go far, heading

off around the corner, just a few streets away. Keith is on the case.

The tracking data showed that the frame went to a property

in the Wandsworth area where it stayed for approximately two days.

The signal shows that the bike stayed in that neighbourhood,

moving around a very small area.

Either he's taken the frame around door to door to try to sell

it or he's rebuilt the bike

and is using it within that area. My hunch is that it's the latter.

It's very likely the bicycle has been reunited with its wheels.

Within days it's on its way to a new location.

Then it travels to Vauxhall, possibly transferred to

a handler for onward sale.

A handler is also known as a fence. They would take

the item from the thief and either sell it to an innocent

unsuspecting member of the public or pass it along the criminal chain.

It doesn't stay here for long though.

The bike now travels south from Vauxhall to the Streatham area,

where it stays for quite some time.

It's likely it has now been sold to an innocent

member of the public. The tracking data shows it commuting back

and forth from Lucien Road to an address in south-west London.

The GPS data gives an approximate location

but won't pinpoint a single address.

We wrote to several properties in the vicinity of the signal to

try and alert them to the history of the bike.

Clearly no-one is interested in talking to us,

as we've heard nothing from those addresses.

So what can cyclists do to prevent their bikes from disappearing

onto the black market?

Take care when leaving your bike unattended, always use good

quality locks and feed them through the wheels and the frame.

Try and leave the bikes in a CCTV covered area

because this will put thieves off committing a crime.

Cyclists can also register their bike with the national

police-approved bicycle database, to give bikes a unique reference

number that can be traced by the police.

We know where our stolen bike has ended up

and we've also filmed at least

five devious bike thieves in the Wandsworth area.

If the authorities want to take a closer

look at our surveillance footage, they are more than welcome.

While tracking technology plays its part in the fight against crime,

there's nothing like good old-fashioned detective work.

Especially when it comes to stopping the criminal

export of stolen cars from our docks.

Based at the Port of Southampton,

DC Nathan Ricketts of the

National Vehicle Crime Investigation Service is on the frontline.

He starts each day with a check on shipping manifests.

How legitimate are the contents of each of these

thousands of export containers?

There's thousands of containers that go out of the country so the easy

ones are the ones that are manifested as vehicles. Obviously

that gives us a straight in, but the harder ones are probably the ones

that are manifested as other things like machinery, household goods

but contain vehicles, so they are hiding obviously their content.

The East African coast take an awful lot of the UK's stolen vehicles

so we concentrate on the ports of Tanzania, Mombasa and Boma which

will then feed into other countries like Uganda and places like that.

So where they were loaded in the United Kingdom is a real

important thing for us.

You know, certain areas have a real vehicle theft problem so if

they have been loaded near to those areas it gives us a little bit more

insight, maybe we need to be looking

at that box and seeing what's inside.

Some of the information on the manifests gives away more

than the exporters might think.

Obviously the ones that aren't declared as vehicles,

declared as household and personal effects,

you would expect the contents of somebody's house to weigh

well over 12 tonnes in weight.

This morning Nathan has been in top gear

and found several containers that he wants to take a close look at.

This container here, it was loaded in Coventry.

Around the West Midlands we do have a vehicle theft problem

and it's listed as household effects going to Tanzania.

The first container appears to be full of used refrigerators,

a common export to Africa.

Probably going to be OK. We can have these sort

of containers scanned just so if they do contain vehicles which

does assist us.

I'm quite happy that this container is all right and it is

what it says it is. We now re-seal them with a unique seal and tell

the shipping line what that seal is so that when the shipper gets

it in Africa he knows the seal that he should expect to see on there.

The fridges are cool, but what about the next container?

Well, it's very hot indeed!

The main thing for me at the moment,

I can see that there is no straps holding the wheels down so if

this was my £70,000 Range Rover, why are you shipping it

in a container that lifts and goes on the back of a lorry and moves?

It'll go onto a vessel which moves. If this was to shift into the side

the container, it would do quite a bit of damage to that vehicle.

As pictures of Nathan's previous catches show,

the criminals have little concern for the condition that stolen

cars will be in, once they arrive at their destinations.

Nathan begins his checks

and quickly finds clues that the car has had its true identity hidden.

That isn't what I would expect to see from Land Rover.

That isn't one of their visible VIN numbers

so that suggests to me that it could well be a stolen vehicle.

The VIN number or Vehicle Identification Number is

a unique code found on every vehicle.

To hide the origins of this one,

the criminals have tried to replace its original VIN with a false one.

Easier said than done.

From a physical point it can't just be removed. To change

the VIN number you have to put a lot of effort into painting it,

grind it off and put a new one in so these areas always usually

put somewhere very difficult.

As you can see it's between the engine and the suspension here

so it's quite difficult to get tools and equipment in there, ie

to deter the criminal from changing it.

The VIN number that's stamped on the suspension strut there is not

what I would expect to see from a Land Rover.

That one is of good quality, it is good, but

it isn't quite what I'd expect to see so it is pointing towards,

it is a stolen vehicle and it's had its identity altered.

Nathan searches for clues in the hope of finding the vehicle's

true owner.

Panels have been removed in the boot,

suggesting that thieves may have been looking for GPS trackers.

OK, that's exactly what I would expect to see,

someone's had the wheel out, not stowed it correctly

and this panel has been pulled off here so...

And the jack's out as well

so expecting to see that, someone's had a good look round.

Presumably hoping to find a tracking device and to remove it.

Nathan has already found two of the car's VIN numbers have been

altered... but there is one more to check.

That's where I'd expect to see the VIN sticker,

but as you can see it's peeling off. It should match these

stickers and look this quality and be stuck firm.

You shouldn't be able to pick them and peel them off so that looks

quite papery to me, it's definitely fake,

definitely not as it should be.

The criminals who stole this car have worked hard to hide

where it came from.

But they've made a school boy error.

I've just opened the glove box

and you would expect to see the Land Rover user manual and things

like that but handily there's an online service warranty book

which has it's true VIN number and identity which differs to this one.

I'm just going to do a check on the police national computer on that

and see what that comes back as.

For the consumers watching this there is some simple

things you can do, crook locks. They're really unattractive

but if you're a criminal looking at a car to steal,

if it's got a crook lock, they'll go down to the one down the road

that hasn't and if everyone does that, they'll protect their product.

-Brilliant, thanks very much.

-A quick call to the

National Police Database confirms Nathan's suspicions.

Um, yes it is stolen, it was stolen on the

22nd of February 2015 from London.

It's not just a case of vehicle theft,

vehicle export, it's also trying to fool us. They're hoping that we

don't know enough about vehicles that they can get it through.

So they're going to extra steps to try

and beat the system. On this occasion it hasn't worked.

We're going to shut the container and send the container to

Africa because that's what the criminals have paid for.

It's a really good hit for us and a good result

and one of many more, I hope.

This car has since undergone forensic examination, to find

clues that will lead Nathan to the criminals who stole it.

The car will soon be returned to its rightful owner in London,

while an empty box will arrive in Africa.

Officers like Nathan do their best to prevent stolen vehicles

leaving our docks

but GPS tracking technology has often stopped vehicles

getting that far.

For instance, plant machinery, an estimated

£70 million worth, is stolen from our roads each year.

So when a telescopic handler went missing from the High Wycombe

area, one weekend in November 2012,

its owners were quick to respond and contacted their tracking company.

We were first made aware of the theft of this

telehandler, I think it was around about 7:30 in the morning.

A customer phoned us and told us that it was no longer on site.

So the first thing we do is switch the tracker into a live mode

which will wake it up and keep it awake

until we've actually done the recovery.

Once switched on, the tracking device pings a signal that

reveals an approximate location.

The telehandler had been, at the weekend, in the High Wycombe

area and when it woke up after we sent it the keep-awake message

it was in the Slough area.

Already 30 miles down the road,

the stolen telehandler wasn't sticking around.

The tracking team acted fast to pick up its trail.

We noticed that the tracker was showing that the vehicle was

possibly moving around the M25 so we instructed our agent to

actually go on the M25 and try and find it.

The particular telehandler

that was stolen on this occasion was a fairly new one and I believe the

capital cost of it was in the region of £35,000.

That's £35,000, and for a vehicle that only goes 15mph.

It was clear that the thieves had loaded this valuable asset

onto a lorry.

The tracker signal showed the telehandler was heading east, so if

it was on the back of an open lorry it should have been easy to spot.

Police joined the search,

posting look-outs from bridges over the motorway.

We were a bit concerned that the police kept coming

back and saying that they couldn't spot it at all

so the conclusion was that we thought it must be

inside a lorry of some description, probably a curtain-sider.

To identify which truck was hiding the telehandler,

the team used another element of the tracker's technology.

They picked up its radio frequency signal with a tracking wand.

This is an example of one of our wands that we use.

So we turn on a radio beacon which gives us

a method of pointing exactly in the direction that the unit is.

Listening to the ping of the beacon and then you're able to

actually narrow down exactly where the unit is.

Even though the trackers were closing in on the stolen

telehandler, they had no idea where the thieves were taking it.

It was apparent that the device was

moving around the M25 and then it turned off and down the M20

so we assumed at this time it was possibly heading for Dover.

With the truck heading towards the port,

time really wasn't on their side.

They had to deduce which lorry was carrying the machine,

before it left the country for good.

As the recovery agent was proceeding down the M20

in chasing the lorry, he eventually started to pick up a faint signal.

The motorway was awash with lorries en route to the docks

and it could have been any one of them.

As he got closer to the lorry the signal increased

so by actually going past the lorry and then dropping back he was

able to identify which lorry had the stolen piece of equipment in it.

A fantastic result. Amidst all that traffic, he's got his man!

Now it was just a question of keeping the lorry in his sights.

He noticed it was a Polish registered vehicle

and at that point we asked the Kent police to be at the docks

and try and stop it before it boarded the ferry.

The trackers followed the lorry all the way to Dover,

where Kent police lay in wait.

They intercepted the thieves before they were able to board the ferry to

the continent and the tracking team recovered the stolen telehandler.

If the telehandler hadn't had a tracking device

on it, it would have gone forever. It would never have been recovered.

The feeling everybody gets at the end of a successful recovery is,

you know, everybody's very pleased including the customer, and

ourselves that our tracking device has worked well again.

So that's another victory for the trackers in the fight

against crime. Happy days!

The most stolen items in the UK today are smartphones,

around 300,000 each year.

Even so, many enterprising consumers have used security apps to

track down their stolen telephones.

It's getting easier, for example, to disable your phone

if it's lost or stolen and obviously it's harder for thieves to

then make use of your phone fraudulently

or to sell the handset on.

What's more, it's now possible to use older discarded phones

as tools for home security - a means of bringing criminals to justice.

Take a look at this footage, filmed in Arizona.

That American lady Mia is talking about a police raid in her

own house, which she recorded on her phone by remote control,

while she was at work!

But this isn't just about a police raid on a house in America.

This security app was designed in the UK

and has been used successfully here too.

There was one burglary here where the culprit was known to the police

and the owner of the property was disappointed with the conventional

CCTV system that was installed outside the building. It was known

to the burglar that it was there so he was obscuring his face with

a hoodie when entering the building and so the footage was useless.

The thief hadn't reckoned on one of the residents turning

a disused phone into a CCTV camera.

That's what caught him in the act!

He had taken off his disguise and was caught in full

view of the camera. The police were alerted, he had fled by then,

but they recognised the individual who was walking around the

property and also for scenes of crimes officers they were able

to see what objects he had touched so with very little effort they

were able to work out where to focus their fingerprinting work and get an

ID on the person and, in fact, he was arrested later that afternoon.

Pretty good work, for a free app and a recycled phone!

In the last year, it's been estimated that there are

£2.7 billion worth of unused mobile phones in the UK alone.

James' security app finds a use for old phones that might

otherwise end up in the recycling.

What used to involve an alarm company coming in,

charging you an annual fee, setting up a system that you would

more often set off by accident than for reasons of a genuine

break-in, is now becoming very easy for anybody to do.

So when is a phone not a phone?

Well, when you place it in a convenient position in your home

and something moves in front of the camera, you can

set the phone to alert you by an email or text message.

It also allows you to stream live pictures or record them.

Around 20% of the apps users are based in Britain,

with the remainder in America.

Mia Nguyen decided to use it to keep an eye on her dogs

while she was at work. Little did she know that it would alert

her to the presence of a thief!

Stunned at the violation of her home, Mia alerted the police

who arrived in time to stop the intruder causing too much damage.

Do you have any idea what the burglar was trying to steal?

Had it not been for the phone app, Mia would not have been

alerted and the thief would not have been stopped in his tracks!

We've heard other stories since then of people using the app

and catching burglars

when they were actually just trying to look at their pets.

So yeah, we got a great thrill out of it.

In both cases, the American drugs thief and the English burglar,

the videos formed material evidence

and the crooks were given short prison sentences.

That'll teach 'em!

From 157 days of filming and more than 250 hours of footage,

Thief Trackers has investigated the problem of the petty thief.

Using a combination of tracking technology

and dogged detective work... DOG BARKS

we've tracked the thieves down to their own backyards.

We've seen crooks working as a team, like these two women...

..stalking their prey... waiting to strike.

And when their victim was distracted...

they pounced.

In a second the handbag was gone.

Our cameras apparently captured the same bag-snatcher on two

occasions, a year apart, still thieving in the same street.

Distraction thieves work in pairs, as in this incident

involving our laptop.

One distracts the victim and the brazen

accomplice steps in so our laptop disappears into the night!

It's a classic piece of deception theft. The victim's

attention has been distracted and he's just gone for it.

We've got a multi-storey car park here just over my right

shoulder, he may have gone in there, looked at the laptop

and maybe secreted it to come back a short time later.

Among many extraordinary incidents of theft, our cameras

captured this shocker.

People stealing from donated items left outside a charity shop.

Treating it like a help yourself buffet.

No, it's morally reprehensible. It's the same as taking

a charity collection box.

We've seen how easy it is to lose our valuables to opportunist

thieves if we're not vigilant.

Our tablet computer caught the eye of this passing snatch thief...

who snuck in and pinched it while the owner was briefly distracted.

Within an hour of the original theft the data showed that the

tablet was in an electrical shop which was less than half

a mile from the original site of the theft.

Our smartphone suffered a similar fate, when a thief whisked it away.

And this bag snatcher was caught on CCTV and on our cameras too,

as he helped himself to a designer handbag.

It's really, really, really disgusting.

With the help of amazing tracking technology,

we've been side-by-side with trackers and the police as

they've hunted down and successfully recovered stolen property.

Tracing pilfered goods to Essex...

uncovering a caravan in Cheltenham...

and tracking a hi-jacked motorbike all the way to Lithuania.

With all this impressive footage, perhaps the authorities

would like to take a closer look at what we've uncovered

and rid the streets of these sticky-fingered law breakers!