FOUR shoplifters who stole £120,000 worth of items from British supermarkets were working for an international smuggling ring, an investigation revealed.
The “Morrisons Four” were ordered to thieve the items from more than 50 branches of Morrisons by a network of gangs in Romania.
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The eastern European gang paid thieves to steal alcohol and toiletries from supermarkets and high street shops.
These were then resold through a wholesaler and a number of car boot sales.
These include £500 worth of toothbrushes, 89 boxes of Strepsils, 108 Sudocrem tubs, and 331 packets of Sensodyne toothpaste.
Duncan Etchells, a retired detective from Norfolk police and who is heading an investigation into the gangs, said one of the houses where the stolen goods were kept was “like a mini Morrisons”.
Shoplifting was not limited to Morrisons, with dozens of stores also targeted, according to Channel 4 Dispatches‘ documentary Britain’s Shoplifting Gangs Exposed.
The gang’s influence was exposed by Rachel Gillett, a crime and investigations manager at Total Security Services (TSS) Ltd, when the firm was asked to investigate the thefts by Morrisons.
On average 1,300 shoplifting offences are reported a day in the UK, the highest rate every recorded, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Prosecution rates however have declined to a quarter compared with twenty years ago – which is heavily costing shops and supermarkets.
In 2022 and 2023 retailers lost £1.8 billion because of shoplifting.
Many retailers are now turning to independent security analysts for help.
This comes as a survey by the British Retail Consortium revealed 60 per cent of shops thought police response was “poor” or “very poor”.
The investigations manager at TSS told Channel 4 she noticed the gang-of-four’s “strange behaviour” after hours analysing Morrisons’ CCTV footage.
Rachel said: “Someone would go round the store and monitor basically the whole area to work out what they needed to do to get away with the products, so you had [at least] one spotter, and two people taking the products.”
The group was tracked to Norfolk and arrested in May last year, after TSS passed their findings onto the police.
Robert-claudiu Alexe and Elena-brindusa Efta, were jailed for 27 months and 18 months respectively.
After collaborating with 27 police forces across the UK the police were able to link the “Morrisons Four” to a Romanian network of organised crime.
Elena told police she had been coerced into the gang’s operations by its ringleader Zeno Gugulan and said she was offered £50 for every stealing mission.
The gang’s leader was later tracked down at his home in Bucharest, Romania by a reporter at Channel 4.
He is understood to be part of a criminal group involved in sharking, human trafficking and tobacco smuggling.
The documentary also revealed the stolen items were sold to a wholesaler run by Indian men in Bedford.
Other thieved goods were sold at a string of different car boot sales in Romford, Essex, and Nine Elms market in South London.
Secret filming also showed vendors admitting they were aware that the product they were selling had been stolen from Boots, Superdrug and Sainsbury’s.
A Romanian undercover reporter posing as a thief was told by a representative of Prime Value Distribution, a wholesaler in Bedford, that they could sell his stolen items “across the globe”.
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