Episode 4 Thief Trackers

Bag snatchers, robberies and street crime.

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 everyday items, like cameras, smartphone and bicycles,

to trace the looters' footsteps.

The thieves may 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 sneak thief who has no idea

he's just stolen a smartphone with a tracking device inside.

I was there and I saw him and I'm like, Argh!

He's spoken to them, all the time keeping his eye on the phone

and then he's taken it. It's shocking.

Dedicated trackers hunt down a stolen motorbike

in a Europe-wide cross-border chase.

Through six countries, had no idea where this bike was going to end up.

It's been on a better holiday than I have this year.

And the search is on, as one couple's transport of delight

is towed away by robbers.

Disbelief, then absolute panic.

They stole part of my life.

Developments in mobile phone technology have led to the rise

of the smartphone. Around 35 million people in the UK own one.

They're such an integral part of our everyday lives

that apparently one in six adults

checks their phone more than 50 times a day.

Because these devices can be packed with

everything from our contacts and diaries to our bank details,

when our phones are lost or stolen, it can be devastating.

Just being able to pick up my phone and talk to people... I think

you forget how often you just pick it up and take it out your pocket.

If I lost my phone, I'd probably... I'd probably be lost.

It's one of life's necessities nowadays.

I mean, 20 years ago, obviously it wasn't.

But the desirability of these pocket-sized

"all-in-one" media devices makes them a prime target for thieves.

Someone did attempt to steal my phone from me

but they, um, they picked the wrong person.

I was out walking my dog

and he tried to take my phone and I fought him off.

Former Metropolitan police inspector Keith Farquharson is helping us

with our enquiries into smartphone theft.

Mobile phones are now the most common item of property stolen,

even more than bags or purses.

Roughly 300 are reported stolen per day in London,

and obviously across the country it's going to be far, far more.

And once your property is stolen, it's very difficult to trace,

unless, of course, you've fitted it with a GPS tracker like this.

The core of that technology is the ability of this device

to measure the range from here

out to orbiting satellites that may be 20,000km away,

way out in space.

But a tracker that size is way too big for the standard phone.

Now this device can be stripped down, made much smaller,

so small that you can hide it within everyday items that you might

carry around with you.

A thief would not be able to know that you have

protected your belongings with a tracking device.

We didn't want to use a tracking app in case thieves wiped

and reset the phone.

So we took a smartphone

and kitted it out with a very small GPS tracking device.

The phone still works

but to fit the tracker inside, some of the functions were lost.

We're heading to the London Borough of Westminster,

the city's top location for crime, and personal robbery in particular.

More than 1,600 incidents in the year to March 2015.

We're going to run this scenario in Soho,

a neighbourhood in the London borough of Westminster,

which has the highest crime rate in London.

It's a really busy street, outdoor drinking. You've got to be

really confident and daring to be a thief in this area.

There are places like this across the country.

We all know where they are in our towns and cities.

It's late afternoon

and one of our team poses as a customer at a cafe

in the heart of Soho.

The smartphone is clearly visible on the table.

Unfortunately it's a sad fact that students

and young women under the age of 24

are more susceptible to the kind of item theft and bag snatching.

This isn't entrapment. She's not leaving the phone unattended.

It is something we might all do on an night out.

Now she's been joined by a friend,

and they soon become engrossed in their conversation.

It's looking quiet so far

and no-one is paying any attention to the phone

but wait a minute! Who's this guy?

It looks like he's going for it.

Maybe this is some kind of bizarre distraction technique?

No, quite the opposite. It looks as though he's helping to clear up.

As we can see here, in the confusion,

he's actually handed the phone to our researcher.

Now he's off and out of curiosity,

our camera follows to see what he's up to.

Amazingly, it seems our man is a Good Samaritan,

on a mission to help keep Soho tidy.

He's clearing up empty beer glasses at the pub and

now he's picking up litter from the street - just incredible. Good work!

Our surveillance operation continues at the cafe,

and as evening draws in, our two young friends

are still enjoying their coffees.

Now, here's someone stopping for a chat.

Seems to be an innocent conversation.

He's going. No, he's back again.

He's clearly checking out the phone.

And there it goes. He waited till the girls were distracted

and then he pounced and he's away into the night.

We can now pick up the smartphone with the tracker.

It shows the thief heading south through the back streets of Soho.

Later on Thief Trackers, we trace the smartphone on its journey

through the back streets of London's West End.

I was there and I saw it and I'm like, "Argh!"

It doesn't surprise me,

anything any more on this street unfortunately.

Thieves can strike at any time and anywhere.

It was in Ross-on-Wye, on the border of England and Wales, where one

heartless robbery shattered a couple's golden anniversary dream.

We were going to have a golden year of holidays.

They stole part of my life.

Cutting-edge tracking technology soon came to their aid.

Caravan enthusiasts Henry and Jen Savage had been enjoying

the freedom of the open road for six years, hitching up

and moving out to wherever the fancy took them, be it in Britain

or the Continent and in 2013, they planned a celebratory trip.

2013 was a special year.

There it is. That the one we're looking for.

It was our 50th wedding anniversary

and we treated ourselves.

We treated ourselves to a beautiful caravan, which

we called Daisy - we always name our caravans.

We bought probably the best caravan that's out there. Everything

you've got in your home, was in that caravan.

Lovely, especially in the sunshine.

She was going to be our whole year's celebration. We were going to go on

as many holidays in that year as we could fit in.

What more could you want?

-Another one!

-Yeah!

Henry's got cancer. He hasn't got long to live.

Time's precious, yeah, how many years have you got that you can

tow a caravan round the Continent and, you know, from 70 onwards.

Whether you're working or you're retired,

holidays are really important.

The couple set about planning what might have been

their very last trip together.

We had a phone call from our friends

said would we like to go for lunch?

Off we went for lunch, had a lovely lunch with our friends,

got back here about five o'clock.

Parked up and went - what's wrong?

Where's the caravan?

Where is the caravan?

My God! The caravan's gone!

Disbelief, and then absolute panic, you know - am I insured,

you know, all the things that would run through your head.

Who's taken it and where's it gone?!

And then wondering, if I drove down the road, would I catch them up?

Have they just left? You don't know what to do!

In fact, they quickly notified the police -

but with several hours' head start,

the thieves could have been anywhere.

Over 4,000 caravans are stolen each year in the UK

but only 3% are ever recovered.

For this reason, Henry had invested in a state-of-the-art

tracking system, that uses GPS, mobile phone technology

and an ultra-high-frequency radio transmitter.

I fitted it, yeah, we tested it - it worked lovely,

but we bought it because it was so high-security.

So with a tracker fitted,

surely it would be a simple task to pinpoint the stolen caravan,

wouldn't it?

I phoned the tracker people

and he said, "Unfortunately, you've turned off the motion sensor.

I said, "Ooh, yes, we were packing it this morning to go to Scotland

"and we turned it off and I forgot to turn it back on when we went out."

So he said, "Don't worry, it'll give out a signal,

"one at 12 o'clock lunchtime, one at 12 o'clock midnight.

"At 12 o'clock midnight, I'll phone you, I'll tell you where it is."

And so we just waited... till midnight.

And midnight came and we didn't' get a phone call,

and I said, "He didn't find it. He didn't find it."

Half-past 12 came and the phone rang

and I picked it up, expecting him to say "sorry" but he didn't.

He said, "I've found it! I've found it!"

The bearer of good news was Richard Taylor,

whose company had been tracking the caravan for Henry and Jen.

We had an approximate location um,

and then we were looking to try and get some GPS positions but they

were very vague - it was indicating that this caravan was not outside.

It was probably inside a building

or an underground car park or a lock-up.

The tracking data showed that the caravan was in Cheltenham,

little more than 25 miles away from Henry and Jen's home!

The only problem was the faint GPS signal meant

they couldn't get an accurate fix.

Richard wasn't easily deterred

and knew he'd have to get to the scene if they were to recover Daisy.

And then he said, "I'll go."

And he did - there and then, he drove down to where

he got the signal from,

so that he was there.

Considering Richard is based in Southampton,

the hour-and-a-half drive to Cheltenham shows admirable

determination to recover their stolen property.

The tracking software zeroed in on the mobile phone mast

nearest to the tracker then, once in Cheltenham, Richard used

radio frequency tracking to get an exact location.

I remember travelling down one of these hills here and picking up

the signal in the car from probably about a mile away

and that's always a good sign -

it means the device is working and we're going to find,

we're going to find the asset or at least the tracking device.

If only it were that easy! It may be a big white caravan,

but it still continued to evade him.

I rendezvoused here with the police and we had a signal from the

device but in this case, the target was in one of a group of buildings.

If it's in a single building, then the police will

knock on the door and go in, whatever time of night it is.

But when it's in a group of buildings like in this

instance, you can't physically see the asset,

then the police can't do anything at that point,

so we had to wait for a warrant in the morning.

The caravan was within touching distance

and Richard didn't want to lose it with a last-minute hitch.

It was going to be a long night.

When it came through to the morning, um, there was

some activity occurring.

A few lorries, trucks pulled up so I thought, well,

I'll get out of my car and stretch my legs and take a wander.

And deep embedded within the building,

right up a ramp through a couple of doors,

I could just make out a caravan was inside that building.

Once I'd eyeballed the caravan through the doorway,

two police cars turned up at the location.

We walked straight up to the owners

and asked, "What's that caravan doing there?"

It seems Daisy was stolen to order by a serial car thief,

then hidden in the lock-up awaiting collection.

The crook was convicted for 26 months

but because the crime had been so invasive

to Henry and Jen's property,

they were left feeling bittersweet by its recovery.

He and I were going to build lots of wonderful memories

during that year which now, looking back, I haven't got.

I've got memory of violation

and theft instead of memories of happy holidays.

You and me - that's a good one.

So what they stole from me is memories.

In spite of their unhappy experience, Jen and Henry certainly

tried to make the best of things - and not be caught out a second time.

We were very nearly giving up caravanning at that stage, er,

we persevered - we... a few months later we sold that caravan

a couple of months later we bought, we decided, we would

carry on we'd have another one but only with even more safety devices.

Let's return to our very own undercover operation,

and track the smartphone stolen in London's West End.

We used a tracking device specially built into the phone.

While our victims were enjoying a chat outside a cafe,

a sneak thief took the phone,

unaware that he was caught on camera.

We returned to the scene of the crime

to show our footage to the cafe manager.

Yeah. Nice.

The thing is, I've seen it happen in real life as well once with

a customer over there, it was... the customer was sitting

on the actual table

and because they were talking and leaning forward,

a lady just come behind and just grab it

but I was there and I saw it and I'm like, "Argh!",

screaming after her.

Unfortunately these things happen really often.

The regular customers that we have,

they become more aware and now they keep a close eye to that,

but mostly with tourists it happens.

You have too many tourists that don't pay attention and it's gone!

It doesn't surprise me,

anything any more on this street, unfortunately.

For thieves as brazen as this one, stealing a smartphone can be easy

and there are plenty of avenues

for them to cash in on their criminality.

There's a big second-hand market for mobile phones.

They're readily transferrable items - they're very easily

disposed of and they're very easily turned into ready cash for them.

But there is a way to make life tricky for phone thieves.

Every phone has a unique number, known as an IMEI number.

They can be displayed on screen

and are often printed inside the battery compartments.

When reporting the theft of a phone,

quote this number,

and the handset can quickly be blocked and made unusable.

Phone theft victims sometimes experience more than just

a financial loss.

Dave Tuczemskyi's wife had her phone and handbag stolen from their car,

right outside their house.

It was literally within the space of 60 seconds.

My wife went into the house, left the door of the car ajar.

She only went to pick up her coffee

and by the time she'd come back out, she got back in the car,

sat in the seat, and her bag had gone.

She was quite upset. She was in tears. I mean, the phone's

got everything personal - you know, it's got photographs

of the family - we've got three children - and it's the fact that

somebody that she doesn't know has stolen those personal possessions

and they've got access then to, you know,

personal data, personal photos.

Thankfully they had installed a tracking app on their phone.

Dave and his cousin gave chase,

tracking the phone eight miles across town,

where they finally caught up with the thief.

He threw the phone into a garden,

so I stopped to get the phone,

my cousin carried on chasing.

Chased him round the corner,

caught him, at which point the police arrived, er,

and he was duly arrested, we had the phone back, um,

and he was sentenced a couple of months later

to three months' imprisonment.

Dave and his family were lucky and very wise to have called in the

police, who always caution against tackling thieves single-handed.

We're more security conscious, we have a CCTV camera on the front

of the house, er, if we leave the car, if my wife leaves the car and

goes back into the house for 30 seconds, it gets locked up.

Now, it's unlikely our smartphone thief made it to open country,

so where did he take it?

The tracking data tells us what we need to know.

The thief walked a short distance to a secluded back street

less than a minute from the cafe where he stole our phone.

Keith picks up the trail.

This fits in with the characteristics

of the crime that the thief would take it

into a place like Romilly Street

which is quiet, out of the public eye,

to have a look at the phone and assess what to do with it.

The signal indicates the thief stayed there for around 25 minutes,

possibly to see if it was locked,

then he headed north along Greek Street towards Soho Square.

He seemed to be working a very small network of streets.

Less than an hour after the theft,

the phone had left

Romilly Street and was here at Soho Square with a really strong signal.

Then, something unexpected happens.

The thief brought the phone here to have another look at it,

decided he didn't like what he saw

and decided to destroy it or get rid of it in some way.

Maybe throwing it down into a dumpster, or down a drain.

The phone had lost some functionality after

the tracker was installed, and it's likely the thief noticed that,

got spooked and destroyed it.

We'll never know its final resting place.

What we do know for certain is that this is the man who stole it,

in crystal-clear surveillance footage.

The authorities are welcome

to take a closer look at this Soho street-thief.

Opportunist thieves like him will snatch whatever they can

at random but there are criminal organisations who steal to order,

targeting high-value luxury items for overseas buyers

as happened in East London,

when an audacious motorbike theft...

by a gang of international thieves...

They have a sponge-like quality for stolen vehicles.

..led to a marathon chase across Europe,

powered by a hi-tech tracking device.

Through six countries, had no idea where this bike was going to end up.

Meet Nicola Casalini, an investment banker from Italy,

now living and working in London.

A biking enthusiast who loves nothing more than

taking his pride and joy for a spin.

Motorbikes of this kind retail from £12,000 right up to 30,000,

so it's only sensible to watch over them with tracking devices,

as Nicola did.

Nicola thought his bike safe with a tracker installed,

but he hadn't realised the brass neck of some thieves.

In March 2014, he found out the hard way.

Nicola went to pay, locking the bike and taking his key.

Unfortunately, he hadn't immobilised the wheels -

a mistake he would soon regret.

Two thieves rode up on a scooter and used it to push

Nicola's superbike off the forecourt and into the road.

All over in seconds - a scenario familiar to Ken German,

former head of the Stolen Motorcycle Team at the Metropolitan Police.

The Ducati Panigale 899, a wonderful piece of Italian

engineering, most desirable, and that's the problem.

It's very thieveable at the moment.

Nicola's missing machine just added to the growing list of

motorbike thefts.

22,500 motorcycles were stolen last year.

13,500 of them are still out there somewhere.

That's an astonishing 60% of stolen motorbikes that are

never recovered, with an estimated worth of £81 million.

Understandably, the huge amount of money that can be made out of

motorcycles and parts is looked on favourably by

organised crime groups.

Sometimes, thieves use stolen bikes as getaway vehicles,

but often they have sneakier intentions.

As every motorbike engine is stamped with a unique vehicle identification

number or VIN, there are two scams that thieves will attempt.

One is to clone or to ring, that is change the VIN engine number

and turn it into another machine, a similar machine, er,

or to steal it to strip it down.

Parts are very valuable, I have to say, and very much in demand.

Faced with the prospect of his new love being reduced to her

component parts, Nicola immediately called the police

and his bike tracking company.

Once the vehicle's moved for more than 20 seconds,

the system triggers an alert.

It's real time, so you can actually go on the internet

and track your own bike, for example.

It gives us the ability to give the police a real-time location.

The last location was some block of flats by the Old Kent Road,

and then the signal was lost.

GPS has to see sky, so they put it into a flat,

and by doing so we'd lost GPS.

It turned out to be a large block of flats but all was not lost.

This tracker is an advanced type,

working with both GPS and radio signals.

The radio frequency can be picked up with a hand-held detector,

even if the GPS signal is blocked.

We worked with the police to go through some of the flats to try

and pick up this RF signal, which we picked up and was quite strong,

but unfortunately there's only so many doors we can knock on

to get a response,

so we weren't able to get a search warrant for every door.

When you can't get your finger on it, that's insanely frustrating!

It's just so close yet so far.

All Bill and his team could do was wait,

hoping the thieves would move the big red bike out of their bathroom

so they could pick up its trail again.

They didn't have to wait long.

The unit came back to life within a couple of days,

and we went there to triangulate on the SIM card,

and we could see it moving out towards the coast, towards Dover.

Although it didn't pinpoint an exact location,

Bill and his team could at least follow the bike's movements.

Back at base, William Bardem kept a watching brief,

hoping for the all elusive GPS fix.

We were very happy, actually, because we knew that the unit was

still fitted, we could get our second chance to try and find it.

But if they were going to find it, they'd need their passports.

Interpol were alerted as the chase went continental.

It went across the Channel, into France, then into Belgium.

In Belgium it did actually stop,

and we did pick up a GPS signal.

There is a theory that maybe they moved it out into a smaller van,

but then, er, that GPS location obviously went when it moved back

into another van and moved off again.

The feeling in the office was a bit of excitement,

a little bit of tension as this had not happened to us before,

and we had no idea where this bike was going to end up.

It's been on a better holiday than I have this year!

Unbelievably, Bill's team tracked the bike on a European tour

through six countries as it headed east to its destination.

In some parts of Europe,

legal ownership of a vehicle becomes somewhat vague.

Some countries actually don't mind you owning

and keeping a stolen vehicle if it's come from another country.

They have databases offering them for sale.

Some of them have still their registration marks

and their VIN numbers on them without being altered.

After travelling more than 1,200 miles,

the stolen motorbike was finally unloaded in Vilnius, Lithuania -

the moment Bill and his team were waiting for.

When the bike eventually came out of the back of the van,

we picked up GPS quite quickly.

We could give the police quick notification of that,

and as they got on site they found a ring.

It was a Bulgarian ring, I believe.

So a few other bikes from America,

some Ducatis and Harleys were there as well,

so I think they were breaking the bikes down and making their own.

It was great, I was running around the office telling everybody, erm,

what we'd achieved. It was, erm, a very good feeling.

Nicola was eventually reunited with his scarlet superbike,

but only after wading through a large quantity of red tape.

A valuable lesson -

and a great result for the GPS trackers in the fight against crime.