Episode 7 Thief Trackers

Bag snatchers, robberies and street crime.

According to the latest police figures,

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

For our little girl, it was her best friend.

So to have your best friend just taken, it's beyond words, really.

But what happens to our belongings when they're stolen?

Thief Trackers shows who takes them and where they go.

Hiding trackers inside items like cameras,

smartphones and bicycles...

to trace their every move.

The thieves think they've got away with it,

but we've got them under surveillance.

Using undercover footage, CCTV and tracking technology,

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

and uncover the unseen journey

that our possessions take when they're stolen.

Today, the thief trackers are on the trail of a stolen purse...

Yeah, it's definitely gone.

..tracking the brazen thieves as they make their escape.

-All right, tell me where they are.

-Oxford Street.

Plus, callous burglars leave one animal lover distraught.

There are nasty people in this world

who will come in and take what's not theirs.

It's like getting my best friend stolen.

And tracking technology comes to the aid of an Essex tree surgeon.

After 20 years of graft to earn the money to get that equipment,

I'm not going to sit there and watch them drive out of the yard with it.

I just thought, "Let's get 'em."

Personal theft is one of the commonest crimes in the UK,

and a favourite hunting ground

for thieves are busy city cafes and restaurants.

Looking for those moments of distraction,

people chatting on their phone,

not paying attention to their belongings.

It only takes a second, and before you know it, it's gone.

Helping the thief trackers with their investigation

is our specialist crime adviser Alex Stewart.

He was assigned to some of the toughest areas of London,

both on patrol and as an undercover officer, in his time on the Force

with the Metropolitan Police.

From theft to drugs to violent crime,

he's seen what life is like on the streets.

Personal theft has been around since before the Artful Dodger

plied his trade, and it's no different today.

But it's wrong to call it petty crime.

We carry our lives round with us in our purses and wallets.

Bank cards, credit cards, cash and driving licences.

It's rich pickings for opportunist thieves.

In 2015 in London alone, they stole over £400,000 worth of goods.

We've fitted a GPS tracker into a purse.

We won't say where. We don't want to give the game away.

But if the purse is stolen,

we can follow the GPS signal on a tablet or smartphone

and track down the thieves.

We've chosen this street because it's exactly the sort

of location that thieves like to target,

crowded with tourists and locals alike,

with plenty of rat runs and access to public transport

so they can make good their escape.

Following the thieves' every move is the Thief Trackers undercover team,

who will be mounting a surveillance operation.

For their safety, you won't see them,

but you will hear their voices.

Keep your camera on these guys.

One of the team positions themselves outside a cafe,

with the purse on the table, just inches away.

As we all do, she's distracted by texting friends

and chatting on her phone,

something that happens every day in towns and cities across the country.

OK, so she's set up.

The tracking device in the purse is live.

Now it's a waiting game.

OK, the guy with the bags.

I don't think this is our man.

Guy having a smoke.

What's his story?

I don't think he's our man.

There have been a lot of passers-by, but so far,

no-one's shown any interest in the purse.

Who are these two coming round?

-Oh, wow.

-Oh.

But it looks like things are about to change.

He's back.

Those two are paying a lot of attention to the purse

with the tracker in it.

There's his pal.

It's the third time he's walked past.

-OK, I think...

-I think he's kind of scoping it out.

-Yeah.

-And again.

-Back again.

-Wow.

I've lost count. How many times is that?

Yeah, it's definitely gone.

OK, let's go.

The thief ducks through the crowds,

escaping down the maze of side streets,

but thanks to GPS technology,

the thief trackers are right on his tail.

-All right, tell me where they are.

-I think they're going north.

Oxford Street.

All right, I can't see them.

Oh, they're really not hanging about, these two.

They're still moving.

Keep going, don't worry, keep going.

I think they might have gone down the Tube.

The tracking signal shows the thief heading towards the Underground.

I can't see them.

Let's... Let's check underground, walk through the station.

OK, it's this shaft that we want.

The signal shows the tracker's last known position, so the thief has

definitely taken the purse underground,

but we don't know in which direction.

But when it surfaces again,

the thief trackers will be waiting to pick up the trail.

Later, the undercover team close in,

tracking the signal as the purse moves.

The motion alarm in the purse has just triggered.

Harlow, in the west of Essex. A new town near the Hertfordshire borders,

home to Tracy and Richard Taylor, their three boys,

and eight-year-old Lexie.

The Taylors are a family of animal lovers, so when one of their dogs

gave birth to a litter of puppies, they were delighted.

But with two dogs already,

they were about to give all their puppies away.

That was until the runt of the litter made a special connection.

Lexie's fallen in love with her.

So she's here to stay.

When we were thinking of the names, he couldn't think of one.

So I got a bar of chocolate out

and I said, "Mum, what type of chocolate is this?"

And she said, "It's caramel,"

and so we decided to call the puppy Caramel.

As soon as she was born, Lexie was just devoted to her.

And the minute the puppy was awake and had her eyes open,

they would be playing.

They just became inseparable, didn't they?

-From the beginning.

-Yeah.

Lexie's got juvenile arthritis, which means that in her knees

she sometimes finds it difficult to be mobile

and needs some encouragement.

So Caramel seemed to really be perfect in that sense.

She's like my best friend.

When she's with me, I feel very confident.

And she's always with me.

But in June 2015, Lexie's confidence was about to be shattered.

I was out at work.

The mother-in-law was round that day.

She called me, asked me what I wanted to do with the dogs,

and I said, "Just leave them out, I'll be home shortly."

But not soon enough, as next-door neighbour Dawn

was about to discover.

I heard the dogs barking.

And normally they're fairly quiet.

And so I went to the window.

Dawn spotted three men making their way down the Taylors' garden path.

They then proceeded to go inside.

I just heard a load of noise.

And then I called my husband.

I could hear the dogs barking and almost...

there was like a yelp there,

as if he had picked one up.

And then he just quickly ran.

My husband just wanted to get out there,

track 'em down and get back anything that they had taken.

Unfortunately, the dog thief had a head start and managed to make

his escape, disappearing into the woods behind the house.

I had a phone call from Tracy,

just saying that she'd had a call saying the house had been burgled.

I was just leaving work and I said, "I'll be there in five minutes."

I came to the front of the house and said, no, everything looks fine.

Walked through to the kitchen, saw the shattered back door.

I was still on the phone to Tracy at the time

and the first thing she asked me, "Is the puppy gone?"

As soon as I looked into the compound where the others were,

I noticed that she was missing.

She's part of our family, it's like taking one of your children, really.

For our little girl, it was her best friend,

so to have your best friend just taken from you,

from the house in such a callous way,

yeah, it's beyond words, really.

We had taken Lexie to my brother's house,

which is just around the corner,

whilst we were trying to get the house sorted

and whilst the police were here.

We decided that, yes,

we'd have to tell her but let's get the house straight

and get ourselves together first

before we can work out how to break the news to her.

I went upstairs with Tracy's brother and I had to explain to her that

someone had broken into the house and had stolen Caramel.

It was a very distressing time, to see her crying,

to have to explain to her that there are nasty people in this world

who will come in and take what's not theirs,

and unfortunately, on that day, they came in and took Caramel.

It's like getting my best friend stolen.

With poor Lexie in pieces,

the family were desperate to track down their stolen pup

and turned to the police for advice.

They were great, actually.

They suggested perhaps using social media.

It's not something we'd done before

so we set about learning how to do it,

setting up a page, and it really just went from there.

Their campaign to track down Caramel went viral.

We had messages from all over the world.

We had different news stations ringing us up,

"Can we do an interview with you?"

It was truly amazing.

We put a poster on the social-media site

so people were printing that off,

and putting that up and taking pictures

and sending them to us, saying,

"We've done what we can to help.

"We're in Newcastle," for example, "and we've put posters up for you."

You couldn't go anywhere without seeing posters - on lampposts,

bus stops, every corner we turned, there was one there, one there.

We used to think, "Blimey, someone's gone out of their way to do that.

"Obviously we've done some but not this amount."

Mum and Dad told me that Caramel went missing and some other people

printed off lots of leaflets and I handed them all round my school

and to all my friends.

The amount of people that were looking,

she was bound to be tracked down,

100%, because she couldn't be moved without someone thinking,

"Is that that dog?" That's all you had to put into people's minds,

they saw it and..."Isn't that little Caramel?"

MOBILE PHONE RINGS

Sure enough, the phone call they were waiting for

eventually came through.

It was literally just ten days.

It felt like a lot longer and it was from a lady that said,

"I think I've bought your dog."

She give me the time and place to meet up and as soon as I turned

the corner, I said to Tracy, "That's definitely Caramel," you could tell.

The lady was genuinely upset

that she had bought the dog for her children

and they were going to be heartbroken.

She gave me the dog.

I immediately took it to Tracy and put it in the car.

We were just over the moon.

-LAUGHING:

-Can you believe it?

It was better than winning the lottery

when Caramel and Lexie were reunited. It honestly was.

It's the only thing we wanted.

Guess who we've got back!

Can you believe it?

When we were able to finally put Caramel back in Lexie's arms,

it was just the best thing ever.

-What do you say to the person that brought her back?

-Thank you!

-Aww!

-It was cool.

-It was fantastic, yeah, really good.

It felt really good having her in my arms.

I was very happy to have her back.

All thanks to the power of ordinary people.

So, thieves should be warned.

When communities get together, they're a powerful force.

Once your property's stolen, it's very hard to trace,

let alone get it back.

The Thief Trackers undercover team

are mounting our own surveillance operation.

Earlier on, we had a purse stolen from outside a cafe.

Yes, it's definitely gone. OK, let's go.

The Thief Trackers team pursued the crook

as far as Tottenham Court Road Tube station.

I think they might have gone down the Tube.

But the signal went dead.

It seems the thief has used the Underground to avoid detection.

But when they surface, the team will be waiting.

Our crime adviser, Alex Stewart,

former undercover officer with the Met Police,

analyses the crime scene.

The lads who committed this offence I would say are atypical.

I would probably be expecting them to be more engaged in a sort of

pedal cycle-enabled snatching.

During the daytime, you'd be more likely to get

your Eastern European gangs. They're very organised.

They will use spotters, they'll have two or three thieves out at a time.

The lads haven't appeared as if they were together.

So there's a certain distance between them.

That would suggest to me that

they were perhaps intending to target this area straightaway.

Because otherwise they might have been walking

immediately adjacent to each other and then separated when they saw

the opportunity, so maybe they've hit this area before.

The spotter has walked up here and, I would assume,

probably stood in one of these doorways up here,

so they have a good line of sight so if the police come down one end

then they can head off before effecting any kind of offence.

Your second suspect then rather brazenly,

but quite casually in his manner,

walks backwards and forwards.

He's just looking for an opportunity.

I think one of the things that was quite interesting about it was

the motion was very, very casual.

He didn't come too close to her.

He walked past and then there was a slight step in, picked the purse up,

very fluidly, and then continued on.

There was no run.

Even if within a minute or so she happens to look down,

there's nothing to attract your attention to that lad.

He has the purse probably tucked up inside there

or down the front of his tracksuit bottoms and he's away,

so there's not even going to be an instinctive, "It will be that guy."

As they've come down this way, they've then...

continued...

..on to Hopkins Street here.

Probably because this is quite a quiet street, it's quite discreet,

so it may well be that they've taken the purse

and they're now rifling through it.

"Have we managed to get anything?

"Is there cash in here that we can go and spend straightaway?

"Are there credit cards that maybe we can sell on?"

I would almost have expected the purse to be tossed by this point.

It doesn't really make sense to me

with suspects of this profile that they'd hang onto it.

Potentially it's because they feel that there's

maybe some resale value in the purse itself.

They've come up Wardour Street and on to Oxford Street.

It looks like they've taken simply

the most direct route to come up towards

Tottenham Court Road station.

Public transport is the friend to these people because

it's very, very busy, it's very cramped, it's very full.

The Tube network will get you out of these sorts of areas very quickly.

So now we've lost the signal on the tracker,

so they're going to be underground at this point.

Whether they're heading off a few stops down to pop up somewhere else

and commit other offences, or it may be that they've come in,

they've seen an opportunity and grabbed it

and are now heading home for the day.

Until the tracker comes above ground,

we're not going to know what the answer to that is.

The tracking signal eventually snaps into action.

The purse has surfaced at Upton Park Tube in east London.

So the team pick up the trail,

tracking the purse to a street 20 minutes' walk away.

According to the tracker, it reckons it's one of these houses just here,

where the purse has gone to.

So, quite a distance from the West End.

OK, let's go.

The purse is definitely here.

The thief trackers decide to rattle the thief's cage

by knocking on doors and asking a few questions.

I wonder if I could talk to you for a second.

I'm trying to find a purse.

Does it look familiar at all?

-Sorry, sir.

-No?

-Sorry, no.

Does that look familiar to you? To you or anyone who lives here?

Have you seen that purse?

The team know who they're looking out for.

We're looking for these lads,

-do you happen to recognise them at all?

-No idea.

-No?

I ain't seen them but if you want to try the younger kids,

-they'll probably know who they are.

-OK, mate.

Got back to the vehicle.

I checked the tracking software,

and the motion alarm in the purse has just triggered straightaway.

So it looks like whoever has the purse had got a little bit excited,

so let's see if it moves again.

The tactics work.

The tracker signal tells the team the purse is on the move,

so we've clearly ruffled some feathers.

The thief trackers are ready to move off,

but the signal suddenly goes dead.

With no sign of the thieves and no tracker,

the undercover team have to call it a day.

So, the undercover team have tracked the stolen purse to east London,

around ten miles away from here, where it was stolen.

Realising we may be onto them,

it looks like they've now discovered and destroyed the tracker.

Although the thieves slipped away,

we still have the footage of these purse snatchers in action

without their faces blurred,

so if the police want to take a look, they're more than welcome.

The county of Essex is home to both

ancient forests and modern plantations,

providing a good living for the tree surgeons

working in the region.

Many are small family businesses,

and their biggest outlay is the tools of their trade.

With 20 years in the business, this man has been hit by theft before.

He's not taking any chances.

We are a target,

which is why I'm doing this anonymously,

because I don't want to make it any easier

for people than it is already.

I've been going for 20 years,

so it's 20 years of graft to get where I am now,

so the fact that someone wants to come and take it off you

in the night is a good motivator to stop them really.

Knowing that his equipment was desirable to thieves,

he had already made sure that his was covered.

The guy we rent the yard from has put CCTV in it

and there's electric gates,

and then obviously there's nobody there 24/7, so you have to make

your own security arrangements really.

But to make sure, he went one step further.

Friends of mine have been robbed over the last 15 or 20 years,

and they recommended certain types of tracker that would do the job.

So he turned to Keith Walker's tracking company for help.

When he first called and asked about trackers,

he'd just bought himself, or recently, a brand-new machine,

cost him thousands and thousands of pounds.

He didn't really understand how trackers worked but I told him that

it would give him peace of mind, it would give him a watchman,

it would give him somebody 24 hours a day

watching where his equipment was.

The machine he had bought was an expensive wood chipper.

It's £19,500 worth of equipment.

It's designed to be mobile because we're mobile

so the downside of that is someone can take it off you just as quickly as you can take it to work!

So you have to think from the thief's point of view,

"How am I going to get rid of this bit of kit?" and try and put themselves in

their shoes and see how you can defend yourself against it.

You can set up movement parameters so if the thing moves

you get an alert to your mobile or e-mail.

You can be asleep, middle of the night, you get an alert.

Now switch on your monitoring panel, whether it's on your smartphone,

PC, laptop or tablet,

and you can now actually follow live

that piece of equipment with the tracker on it

as it's on its way.

You know exactly where it is,

you know how fast it's going and you'll know when it's stopped,

you'll know when it's gone into a building,

you'll know exactly where it is.

So it's like you're actually sitting on top of the machinery.

With the tracker installed,

it wasn't long before it was called into action.

Me and my son came in after a particularly heavy day's work

and had dinner, literally had a shower,

just put my feet up and then the motion sensor went off.

I just said, "I'm going up the yard to check it out.

"I'll be back in a minute." As I drove in,

I noticed that the cameras had all been pushed up

and the doors of the container were open,

so straightaway I realised I was being robbed.

So I got down to the gate,

phoned the police and phoned up a few friends who are local,

who could come and help me.

And one of them came and he swept through the yard

while we were at the gate

and said, "There's no-one in there.

"And you've been cleaned out."

Thieves had broken in, ransacking the lock-up.

The thing is, after 20 years of graft

to earn the money to get that equipment,

I'm not going to sit and watch them drive out of the yard with it.

I just thought, "Right, let's get 'em."

The police arrived, and armed with his mobile phone,

he joined the chase,

following the GPS signal from the tracker in the wood chipper.

They were about ten miles away so

then it was a case of catching up with them.

Then it started moving towards us.

We were driving quite fast and it turned off just before we got to it.

At one stage, I think we were 200 metres away from him.

He was stationary.

We drove past him, we drove round.

But there was no vehicle there and that's when I realised

he'd thrown the tracking device into the River Chelmer.

We were following a floating tracker.

If a tracker, for instance,

is in something that goes missing at one in the morning and you don't

know until eight in the morning, that history is recorded.

You know the route it took and you know exactly when it stopped

and you know exactly when it moved.

So they backtracked to the previous location

where the tracker last stopped.

When we turned up at the stationary location,

there were quite a lot of industrial units there.

We had to narrow down which one it was,

so we asked some questions and we deduced it was probably

at this one particular place.

We then had a little look around,

and round the back of a sort of barn building

we did find my wood chipper

and another vehicle which was loaded up with all my tools as well.

I was a bit concerned, because there was only two of us in there.

We just put the chipper back together and by then

my son and a friend of m ine also turned up.

We took the wood chipper back and the police

took the vehicle with all the tools in away

to do some forensic tests on it.

They were quite pleased and they said

they'd recovered vehicles before,

but he said he'd never recovered any plant with a tracker before,

so it was a first for him.

It couldn't have gone better for us.

However, this wasn't the end of the trail.

In the morning,

I checked my tracker and I was still receiving a signal

further downstream from the bridge.

So my son

and a friend of mine got canoes

and paddled up the river with iPhones and tracked the tracker.

And managed to find it floating in the reeds, and it was still working,

which is pretty amazing.

We were gobsmacked with this.

The thing was actually floating down the river when it was retrieved.

This was not a waterproof model, it was a water-resistant model,

but, hey, that worked!

Stuff like that, it pays off. It's definitely paid off with us.

Through quite a small investment,

we'd got everything back that had taken me 20 years

to earn the money to put together.