Episode 2 Thief Trackers

According to police figures,

more than 3,500 theft incidents

are reported every day in the UK.

I knew it was bad, but I didn't think it's that bad.

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

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,

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

No, honestly, I don't know!

..and uncover the unseen journey that our treasured possessions take

when they're stolen.

Today, we're on the trail of a stolen laptop

as an opportunist thief goes walkabout.

It's a classic piece of deception theft.

The victim's attention has been distracted

and he's just gone for it.

Plus, a crooked businessman who feels nothing is sacred

when it comes to handling stolen goods.

He is a very callous man with no feelings whatsoever

for what he does to other people.

And cutting-edge tracking technology is hot on the heels

of a gang of international truck snatchers.

I walked round where the office was and that's when I saw

the office door kicked in and I realised right then

that the lorries had been stolen.

Laptops are among the most desirable electronic gadgets around.

Over 65% of us in the UK have one,

putting it high up the computer consumers shopping list.

Unfortunately, that also makes these highly priced portables

a prime target for thieves.

To help us get an understanding of the criminal mind,

we've enlisted the help of Keith Farquharson,

former Metropolitan Police inspector and security consultant

with over 30 years' experience.

Police figures show that over 34% of all thefts in Central London

are computer related thefts -

that's purely because it's so easy to sell on

and make a good profit out of it.

And once your laptop's stolen,

there's little you can do to trace it,

unless of course you have it fitted with a tracker like this.

It's a GPS tracking device, with a battery as small as a matchbox.

Depending on how many signals the tracker sends out,

the battery can often last for up to 14 days.

So this is a tracking device

and that means that the device is able

to figure out its location. How does it do that?

Well, it does that by using a technology known as GPS -

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.

Now all I've got to do is just place the tracker and the battery

gently inside, making sure that it's not visible from the outside.

With the tracker fitting snugly under the keyboard,

a thief would never suspect it's there.

Here you have the laptop with GPS tracker installed.

Now the tracker is secure we're heading to Soho

because it is London's number one spot for personal theft.

More than 850 such thefts took place in these streets

in the 12 months to February 2015.

In fact, the borough of Westminster as a whole

is London's number one borough for all crime.

All our towns and cities have hot spots like this,

and we all know where they are.

The location for our stakeout is a cafe in the heart of Soho.

As you can see behind me, there's a footfall here of hundreds of people

per hour going through, so ample opportunity for thieves to act here.

The type of crime we can expect are opportunistic thieves acting singly,

or distraction thieves acting as pairs or in teams.

It's 7:30 at night,

one of our production team is outside posing as a customer,

drinking coffee, chatting on her phone,

with the laptop clearly visible on the table.

Now this isn't entrapment, she's not leaving the laptop unattended,

she's doing exactly what we all do when we drop by our favourite cafe.

Thief Trackers isn't about confronting and catching thieves red-handed,

we just want to see what happens to a laptop

when it's stolen and find out where its journey ends.

Now we're underway, our larger overt cameras withdraw,

leaving just these two small hidden cameras to catch the action,

so it's just a question of time, as the team wait for a thief to pounce.

15 minutes gone and no-one has paid any attention to the laptop.

Wait, we might have some interest here...

Maybe not.

It's nearly 8pm, early by Soho standards,

but still bristling with people.

So far no-one has shown any criminal intent towards our laptop.

Ah, here's someone having a sneaky peek.

No, just curious.

More than an hour now, and aside from the odd glance

our laptop hasn't gained an awful lot of attention.

Our researcher is really getting into her role as a cafe customer,

distracted by a telephone call.

Unfortunately, at this point one of our two hidden cameras loses power,

so we're left with only this angle.

Now hold on. Who is this man?

The laptop's right in front of her,

so it would take a brazen thief to whisk it from under her nose.

But this is what happens when thieves work in pairs.

What you can't see is

our researcher has been distracted by someone out of shot

and now once the victim's attention is taken away from the laptop,

the other crook is free to make a move.

Now he's got the signal from his mate and he's going for it!

In the blink of an eye he's off.

And there goes the accomplice.

We can pick up the laptop with the tracker now,

which shows the thief is heading south,

through the Soho backstreets.

Later, we trace the laptop's extraordinary journey

through London's underworld.

The thief knew this area quite well -

it may well be that he's got contacts within the local area

and selling it on to one of those.

Thieves don't always work in pairs,

sometimes theft can be the result of a criminal acting alone,

prizing financial gain above any consideration

for the feelings of his victims.

That's what happened in Croydon, South London,

with a catalogue of robberies that shocked a community.

How someone could commit a crime like this -

it's absolutely appalling in my view.

And the cold-blooded actions of an unscrupulous local businessman

who dealt in the spoils of graveside robbery.

He is a very callous man

with no feelings whatsoever for what he does to other people.

He was unaware that police were about to catch him out

with cutting-edge tracking technology invisible to the naked eye.

Showing SmartWater on the cutting blades.

This shameful tale of grave desecration began back in 2011,

when a relative visiting Croydon Cemetery made a sad discovery.

A member of the family came into the office,

stated that their plaque was missing.

A member of my team went out to the area to look at it

and we found that a whole rose bed of bronze plaques had been taken.

And that hit us straight away,

we realised that some major crime had taken place

and a number of memorials had been taken.

We're not talking a handful here, but 900!

Yes, 900, plaques worth roughly £150,000.

Nothing was safe from the thieves, not even war memorials.

The impact that this kind of crime has on families is immeasurable,

people at all different stages of the bereavement journey,

and the impact can hit them as greatly as it did on the day

that they first had the bereavement.

People just couldn't believe that someone would stoop to those levels.

This bout of grave robbery soon came to the attention

of Sergeant George Shannon.

He's a key figure in Operation Ferrous,

a nationwide clamp down on metal theft, which police estimate

costs our economy over £700 million a year.

Metal theft is the second biggest crime generator in the world after drugs.

But the actual metal theft itself is undertaken by a variety of people

from the desperate thief with drug problems to organised crime.

Following a tip-off from trading standards officers,

the police began to investigate a scrap metal dealer in Croydon.

He seemed to have no scruples when it came to buying bronze plaques

fresh from the graveside.

His scrapyard was just a mile away from the cemetery -

maybe just a coincidence?

40% of all our metal thefts were within half an hour

walking distance of this yard,

which is disproportionate for a borough the size of Croydon.

His actions were so despicable that they even shocked other criminals.

For example, one person who gave us information said,

"Whilst I may be no angel,

"I don't believe in chopping up war dead plaques. He's gone too far."

In May, 2012, the police mounted a raid on the yard

to bring this unpleasant trading to a halt.

And this is what's left of the yard now at the moment.

It's where it all took place.

Sergeant Shannon takes us back to the scene of the crime.

Now an empty shell, it was once a hive of criminal activity.

The police found more than 400 bronze plaques.

They were all seemingly stolen from local cemeteries.

People were shocked - even a lot of experienced police officers saying,

"No-one's going to be robbing from graves in 2012,"

and the sheer quantities they were doing it in

for the sake of a relatively small amount of money.

The crooked dealer had been paying as little as £1 for each plaque,

well below its true value.

But that hardly matters when you consider the emotional damage he'd been causing.

There was plaques that had been there for 20 years

to ones that had been there less than a year.

Very touching, kind of moving ones -

people had recorded when they had a still birth,

when the child was born.

Down at the back of the yard we found memorial plaques

in the process of being chopped up.

A vain attempt to disguise the stolen memorials before selling them on.

He knew exactly what he was doing, but just didn't care.

By chopping up the plaques he thought he'd get away with it.

What he hadn't realised was that some of them had been marked

with an invisible tracking system called SmartWater,

it glows under ultra-violet light.

Each bottle of SmartWater contains a unique forensic code

that is registered to the individual owner of each bottle

and can be applied to almost any item.

Samples of this chemical taken from stolen property can be tested

back at the lab to help trace its origin.

The SmartWater was already on the memorial plaques

marked by the gravesides.

The trace elements were also showing where the various machines

had chopped the plaques up,

so it formed a continuous link - evidentially it's quite important.

The scrap dealer was also unaware that the police had laid a trap for him,

coating a lorry full of supposedly stolen

high voltage industrial cable with this invisible tracking liquid.

We marked it into three different delivery slots,

each marked with SmartWater.

Through his greed, paying way below market value for the goods,

he accepted the goods knowing them to be stolen,

and we found evidence of all three deliveries at the yard

when we raided it.

The police uncovered a whole host of stolen goods at his yard -

the profits from his disgraceful dealings soon became all too evident.

But this shady metal trader treated his arrest as a minor hiatus

in his illegal activity.

The reaction of the owner was completely deadpan,

no remorse whatsoever, casual indifference to the whole situation.

If this yard was not turning a blind eye to

the people who were selling it

those graves would not have been desecrated.

Ironically, the dealer's own CCTV footage has him bang to rights,

overseeing the destruction of the memorial plaques.

The rogue metal merchant was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Perhaps not as severe as some of his victims would have liked,

but hopefully they take some comfort in knowing that the crook

has been brought to justice -

preventing other families from suffering similar losses.

When tracking down stolen personal electrical items,

good results can be much harder to achieve.

At Thief Trackers we're mounting our own undercover operation.

Earlier on we fitted this GPS tracker into a laptop.

While outside a Soho cafe,

our victim was seemingly distracted by one crook,

while a second man stole the laptop -

unaware that our covert cameras saw his every move.

The thief slipped away into the shadows, but where did he go?

The tracking software now does the legwork for us.

The data is stored online,

mapping the laptop's journey from the moment of theft.

So this device has got on board a form of communication technology.

It's rather like the device has got a mobile phone on board

and if you want to figure out where the device is

you send it a message and say, "Well, where are you?"

The device then communicates to you via the internet

and sends you a set of information saying,

"This is where I am right now."

After the thief struck,

the data shows he's walked away swiftly heading south,

he stopped for almost two hours in the Whitcomb Street area.

Our crime expert Keith Farquharson has been analysing the tracking data.

As you can see, during the daylight hours

this is a well-used cut through between parts of London,

during the night-time

it's not so well populated at all.

In fact, it's very quiet although it is covered by CCTV.

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

although that closes during the weekdays at 11:30pm.

So the timeline does kind of fit in with that.

He may have gone in there, looked at the laptop

and may have secreted it and come back a short time later.

The tracker shows the laptop continues its journey south

to Villiers Street, alongside Charing Cross station.

It stayed in this location overnight.

Trying to keep an open mind on things.

The person has either secreted it overnight

and come back to it early the next morning,

or kept it on them and slept rough around this location.

As you can see over my right hand shoulder there's a shopping centre

beneath Charing Cross station, where homeless people do sleep,

and further down the road there's exactly the same, it's duplicated.

So the mystery deepens.

Was the thief sleeping rough in the city centre?

Let's consider his activities the next morning.

The tracking data reveals that at around 8:00am,

the laptop crossed the River Thames at walking pace.

It was heading towards a network of streets

at the rear of the Old Vic theatre,

meandering around Webber Street and Mitre Road.

The trail that's indicated by the tracking system

would indicate that the thief knew this area quite well.

Just down the road a little bit from Webber Street

is a homeless shelter

where people do tend to congregate relatively early in the morning -

that may be an indication that that's where the person was going,

it may not. We'll have to keep an open mind on these things.

It may well be that he's got contacts within the local area

and selling it on to one of those,

or just an on spec type sale to anybody that he approaches.

Suddenly there was a change in the laptop's journey pattern

when it moved to the north-east of London to the Balls Pond Road in Dalston.

The data indicates that the laptop spent the weekend there.

I think it's been passed on.

All the indications are that this person that originally took it

was very comfortable in the way that he was walking around.

It was quite parochial,

and then to go over to Dalston is quite a large leap.

So perhaps our thief passed the laptop to an accomplice

who took it to Dalston?

But why did it then return to the city centre on the Monday morning?

Was it being brought back to sell in the West End?

By this point, our laptop's now seen more sights than an open top bus.

It moved around the Charing Cross area, eventually heading to

a building on Irving Street, a theatre ticket agency.

It remained there for 11 hours and then the signal stopped.

So at 1pm the GPS shows that the laptop was at the ticket booth behind us.

That ticket booth has got a basement level to it,

and with GPS it will only show you the location,

it won't show you actually on what floor of that particular location it's on.

So follow up enquiries would have to be made with staff there.

We decided to visit the ticket agency to continue our hunt.

We were welcomed by renowned theatre impresario Ashley Herman,

producer of more than 35 West End shows

and the founder of Encore Tickets.

He was very surprised to see us.

The only thing which is strange, I can't quite figure out is

that the shop shuts at about eight o'clock at night,

and yet you were still tracking it after that time,

which implies that someone left it there.

I don't think our staff would have noticed anyone coming in

with a laptop any more than they would recognise someone coming in

with a camera or a suitcase.

And I guess it would be quite possible for them to just

leave it under the stairs or shove it behind a box or something.

I mean, it could of course just be discarded all this time.

If any criminal activities are going on in London,

particularly that could affect tourists one way or another,

such as leaving stolen goods in a shop,

we want to know about it and we want to help stop it,

so we're a 100% behind what you're doing

So our laptop travelled around for five days

before the tracker signal stopped,

possibly the shortest run in West End history.

So the conclusion to the journey of this particular laptop is that,

that it's ended around this particular area,

probably at that ticket booth, but there's no evidence to indicate

that anybody within the business of the ticket booth is responsible

or had any dealings at all with that particular piece of property.

It's a mystery what became of the laptop,

but it's very likely that the thief discovered the tracker.

That thief either destroyed it or made it unusable.

It may be the street collectors have collected it and put it in a bin.

Or he in fact has put it in the rubbish with the rubbish left out overnight.

We don't win them all on Thief Trackers.

And it looks like this time the thief got away with it.

But the authorities are welcome to take a closer look at our

surveillance footage and take action against the Soho street thieves.

Criminality takes all forms, from the spur of the moment act by a

petty thief to large scale robberies undertaken by organised crime gangs.

Every day in the UK, ten lorries are stolen,

often to order and with a very low recovery rate.

On average, just 12% are found,

so it's no surprise that haulage companies

are looking for ways to protect their assets.

Salfords, a village 24 miles south of London,

close to the M25 orbital motorway.

It's the setting for an audacious robbery

by a gang of international lorry thieves.

The police told me that there was approximately ten vehicles -

there's a good million pounds worth.

All that stood in the way was a hi-tech GPS tracking system...

It was highlighting the speeds

and the fact that the thieves were actually speeding in the vehicle.

..and one man's dedication to duty.

And I saw the office door kicked in and the whole office was trashed

and then I realised that the lorries had been stolen.

Paul Ruth has been a lorry driver for over 40 years,

the last three for a waste management company near Gatwick Airport.

I'm a Rolonof driver

delivering containers to different companies.

That can entail about 300 miles a day.

Paul's even forged a kind of bond with his 32 tonne machine.

This is my little office.

I sit in this lorry for eight hours plus a day,

and it belongs to you, it's your area.

Ah, nice.

Rolonof lorries such as Paul's cost £115,000 each.

Considering around £500 million worth of trucks and goods

are stolen every year,

Paul's looking after a very valuable asset.

Sadly, criminals will find ways to steal anything,

no matter how big it is

as Paul was about to discover one weekend in September 2014.

Well, that Sunday morning,

I just come in cos I'd been away on holiday,

family holiday for a week,

and I just said to my wife,

"I'll just go and check the lorry over and check the work,

"see what I've got for tomorrow,"

and arrived just after nine o'clock and the gates were open.

The first thing that come into my mind was

the other driver that I work with had come in on some overtime

to maybe catch up, but then I realised that his car wasn't there

and then I just looked over to where we parked the vehicles

and both our Rolonofs were gone.

I walked round where the office was

and that's when I saw the office door kicked in.

I just peered in there and the whole office was trashed.

Thieves had broken in,

smashing up the office in their hunt for the lorry keys.

And then I realised right then that the lorries had been stolen.

You know, I thought if anything would have ever happened

maybe the diesel had been drained or something like that,

but not to actually take the vehicle itself.

It felt pretty invasive, really, cos it's not their lorry,

it's my lorry that I drive every day,

I've got my own personal possessions in it.

I wasn't happy about that at all.

With £230,000 worth of trucks stolen,

Paul's first job was to call the police.

And within eight minutes we had a police officer arrive,

the first questions he asked me was, "Are the lorries tracked up?"

-And I said, "Yes, they are."

-As luck would have it,

the company had recently invested in a GPS tracking system.

The trackers that were put in to these lorries were only done

I think about five months previous -

not because they think it's going to get stolen,

but it's to see where we are during the day,

they can check this lorry's nearer to the job than that lorry,

so it's beneficial for time, fuel costs as well.

But these were techno-savvy crooks,

they'd stripped all the electrical gadgetry they could find

from the trucks in the hope of sabotaging the tracking systems.

No-one could be sure the trackers were still operating.

I was alerted by a phone call from my colleague

saying that the depot had been broken into.

So when I first logged onto the system,

the tracking information gave me the whereabouts of the vehicle.

Thankfully the tracker was undamaged,

sending GPS signals to update their movements.

This showed the stolen HGVs travelling east along the A13.

It was a relief, knowing that the trackers were working.

But then anxious that, were we ever going to get the vehicle back?

The tracking data is recorded 24/7,

logging the truck's location, speeds

and whether the ignition is on or off.

A quick look at the tracking history told John the thieves had struck

on Saturday night, taking the lorries up to East London

to hide them overnight.

He constantly updated the police on the stolen trucks' positions,

but decided to let the professionals take over.

I actually gave them the permissions

to log in to our tracking system

and they could track for themselves and guide their police in directly.

It was just waiting, see what happened next.

The thieves weren't hanging about.

The tracker showed them speeding north towards Chelmsford,

and the likelihood was that the trucks were destined

for Felixstowe Docks to be shipped abroad.

The police gave chase, but these thieves were clearly no amateurs.

They'd definitely driven a lorry before, especially with this,

you've got a high and low range gearbox,

it's got eight forward gears,

they would have to have known how to change that up otherwise

they wouldn't have got very far in the low range, it's quite slow.

The vehicles had now reached the outskirts of Chelmsford

and the data readout indicated the engines had been switched off.

Unfortunately, when the police arrived,

the truck rustlers had left the scene,

although they had collected quite a haul.

The lorries were found in a disused scrap merchants yard.

The police told me that there was approximately ten vehicles there,

each of them valued at around about 100,000,

so there's a good £1 million worth of vehicles there.

You heard it, £1 million worth of the latest in heavy-duty

commercial transport, snatched back from under the criminals' noses.

The owners of the other eight vehicles

were delighted to have their trucks returned too.

The police did suspect that the vehicles were going to go abroad.

Waking up on a Monday morning,

we would have discovered our vehicles gone

and our tracking would have still worked,

but it would probably have shown them going down the English Channel.

So an international truck snatching operation had been thwarted

thanks to cutting-edge tracking technology

and one man's dedication to his work.

Well, I keep my lorry under floodlights every night now.

Make sure it's locked up every night.

I don't leave anything personal in it any more,

cos I don't want to lose it again.

We didn't have all of our vehicles tracked,

we've now gone over to tracking all of our vehicles.

If they want to try a similar crime then they will be caught,

we will track them and we will recover our property.

I would say "good luck" to them,

but I don't particularly want them to try

cos of the inconvenience it causes.