It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief

This week, Richard hits a hardware store in Birmingham. The family-run store has been selling nuts and bolts for 40 years, but it is attracting more than DIY enthusiasts – it’s a free-for-all for thieves, who are getting away with £10,000 worth of gear every year. To expose the gaping holes in the store’s security, Richard strikes and manages to load a van of goods within minutes. But he is in for a shock when the staff let rip and throw him out of town. With staff refusing to see him, it is down to his partner-in-shop-crime Will Davies to try to make amends and sort out their failing security. In Cleethorpes, a value store is just not cheap enough for the local shoplifters, who are helping themselves to thousands of pounds worth of life’s little essentials. The all-women team’s secret weapon is Bertha the baseball bat, but when Richard fills a pair of specially adapted trousers with a mountain of gear, the staff are astounded. Although the owner has spent a small fortune on CCTV, no one is watching the screens until the thieves have cleared them out and made their getaway. So after Richard gives staff a master class in CCTV surveillance, he tests them one final time with one of his boldest moves yet.

Reformed master thief Richard Taylor and West End Crime Prevention Officer Will Davies show a designer clothes chain how to clobber cheats and pilferers, and a convenience store owner gets good advice on preventing gangs of child thieves from stealing his profits.

Richard and Will continue to travel around the country showing some of the scams that thieves use to grab the goods and some of the massive holes in store security.

Richard and Will Davies show some staff working at a North London charity shop and a Glasgow off-licence how to stop the thieves who are stealing their profits.

Could Tricky Dicky, aka master thief Richard Taylor, be losing his edge? To test out its defences, Richard targets a London music shop that stocks enough mega-bucks guitars to keep ZZ Top on the road for another 50 years. The store has been hit by some magicians of the criminal world, including one thief who made a guitar disappear underneath a magic mac. Richard and his accomplice do not make such an easy getaway – in fact they are lucky to get out without getting nicked! Also this week, a garden centre in Biggleswade, is hit by the team. The centre is losing an estimated 2,419.26€ a year as shoplifters steal shed loads of gear. Two men managed to throw some strimmers and pitchforks over the fence and some girls raided the gift shop – all of them walking out scot free. The staff do not see Richard or his accomplices coming and he performs a supermarket sweep, filling a basket before swanning out of the entrance and handing the contents over to his friend before heading back in for more. It seems that the manager would rather tend to the plants than take on the crooks, and he might be sorry that he asked for help when Richard challenges him to get inside the thieves' mindset and go on a shoplifting spree of his own.To keep everything rosy, PC Will Davies turns up with some clever new gizmos to help the staff on the shop floor gear up to take on the shoplifters.

Reformed thief Richard Taylor and serving copper Will Davies have seen their fair share of devious thieves over the course of the series, but they hope that they have taught shopkeepers what to watch out for and how best to tackle the people who are stealing their profits. This week they are in Liverpool, where a family-run chain of chemists is being hit by shoplifters who take everything from hair dye to condoms. Staff are too busy mixing prescriptions to notice – as one woman fills her shopping bag, it takes a beady eyed customer to expose her. The owner is a friendly pharmacist who puts customer care first, and shameless Scousers are taking full advantage along with heaps of stock. Tricky Dicky’s dastardly scam is to go into the chemist in a wheelchair and fill a tailor-made blanket with over 60.48€ worth of gear. He then sends in a reformed thief to pull the latest scams on the other shops in the chain, including variations on the old-school price-tag swap and the crafty receipt scam. Copper Will Davies thinks that the chemists’ regulars could be co-opted to be the pharmacist’s eyes and ears, but grassing on people is a big ask for the locals. Next the crime-fighting duo visit a vast pet shop in the outskirts of Leeds which is falling foul of the thieves’ latest craze – stealing live pets to sell on the black market. Everything from fluffy kittens to pythons are considered fair game. Richard demonstrates how it is done when he leaves the shop with a terrapin in a takeaway cup, while Will tackles preventative measures, going beyond the usual security toolkit to come up with a way of stopping the super furry animals going walkies. As Richard and Will come to the end of their journey, have the UK’s shopkeepers learned anything from them? Or will the battle between the thieves and the retail industry continue?