A gang of shoplifters dubbed the ‘Morrisons Four’ by police stole £120,000 of goods from British supermarkets on the orders of an international crime gang, an investigation has found.
The shoplifters were ordered to steal from more than 50 branches of Morrisons by gangs from Romania, who then resold the goods through a wholesaler and car boot sales.
A new Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, Britain’s Shoplifting Gangs Exposed, lays bare how dozens of retailers appear to have been targeted in this way.
Britain’s supermarkets are grappling with a nationwide shoplifting epidemic, with an average of 1,3000 offences recorded every day in the UK, the highest since records began in 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Retailers are calling for harsher punishments as prosecution rates have fallen to a quarter compared with two decades ago.
In 2022/23, retailers were forced to come up with £1.8billion thanks to an increase in shoplifting.
The Morrisons Four were caught out when Rachel Gillett, a crime and investigations manager at Total Security Services (TSS) Ltd, identified the gang on her first day working for the firm that were hired to probe a dramatic spate in thefts.
As she trawled through hours of CCTV, Gillett started to notice a pattern of ‘strange behaviour’ by the same four shoplifters who would brazenly target Morrisons stores.
‘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,’ Gillett reveals on Dispatches.
The analysis was shared to police after tracking the group to Norfolk.
Two of the four, Robert-claudiu Alexe and Elena-brindusa Efta, were arrested in May last year. They were convicted and jailed for 27 months and 18 months respectively.
In an investigation dubbed Operation Hemsworth, Norfolk Police worked with 27 other forces across the country in areas where the thieves had targeted Morrisons.
Detectives were able to track the four to Romanian gangs who pay thieves to steal alcohol and high value toiletries, including £500 worth of toothbrushes, from supermarkets and High Street shops.
In one house linked to the organised criminals, police discovered 89 boxes of Strepsils, 108 tubs of Sudocrem, 331 tubes of Sensodyne, and many more household items.
Duncan Etchells, a retired detective from Norfolk police who led the investigation into the gangs, said it was ‘like a mini Morrisons’.
Efta told police in her first interview that she was coerced into working for the gang by criminal ringleader Zeno Gugulan – a Romanian citizen who has been linked to 54 offences in the UK but remains at large.
She claimed she was paid £50 for each shoplifting spree.
Dispatches then tracked Gugulan to his home in Bucharest, where he found the ringleader was connected to a group of men who had been proved by Romanian police for crimes including human trafficking, loan sharking and tobacco smuggling.
When confronted by reporters in Bucharest, Gugulan confessed he told the stolen items to a wholesaler run by Indian men in Bedford, later unmasked as Prime Value Distribution.
Dispatches also found that dozens of items were being flogged at car boot sales in Romford, Es𝑠e𝑥 and Nine Elms market in Vauxhall.
Market traders were secretly filmed admitting that they knew the items had been stolen from shops such as Boots, Superdrug and Sainsbury’s.
A representative for Prime Value Distribution told an undercover Romanian reporter posing as a thief that the company could sell his stolen goods ‘across the globe’.
They later denied selling stolen items.
‘Britain’s Shoplifting Gangs Exposed: Dispatches’ will air on Channel 4 at 8pm on November 25 and afterwards on channel4.com.