As they fled from the business meeting with three luxury watches worth £640,000 in their grasp, the thieves made little effort conceal their glee over their Halloween heist.
The criminals had used wads of fake money to distract their target. Now, like nightmarish trick or treaters, they threw the worthless bundles into the air as they made their escape through London’s Canary Wharf.
The daylight heist of the timepieces, including a prized Rolex “Paul Newman” Daytona worth £400,000, may have been unusually brazen.
But London, along with other European capitals and tourist hotspots, is experiencing an epidemic of watch theft.
Metropolitan Police figures show that 1,700 watches worth a combined total of £16m were stolen in London in the first five months of last year.
In a little over four years, about 27,000 timepieces worth £140m have been snatched or stolen in the capital, with the average value of each watch now standing at about £9,000 – up from £4,000 in 2018.
Among the high-profile figures to have been targeted in often terrifying street robberies are singer Aled Jones, who was this summer robbed of his £17,000 Rolex by a machete-wielding thug on a west London high street.
Industry experts told i that similar numbers and values of watches are being routinely stolen in well-heeled European hotspots including the Balearic Islands, Paris, and the Greek party island of Mykonos.
And the problem is global: in May, masked thieves snatched 70 watches worth an estimated £1.5m heist in a smash-and-grab at a Rolex store in Tokyo.
The result is a long list of offences to investigate for stretched police robbery squads, from Mayfair to Ibiza.
But it also means a burgeoning database of watches for private investigators, retailers and auctioneers to try to spot and recover, as this particularly lucrative form of illicit bling makes its way back onto the market – often with remarkable speed.
The trio of watches taken in the Canary Wharf Halloween theft, which happened in 2019 but is only being made public for the first time, are among the 80,000 timepieces (nearly half of them Rolexes) now listed with The Watch Register.
The London-based database of stolen or lost was set up a decade ago by the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private repository of information on stolen paintings, antiques and other art works.
With watches worth more than £1bn on its books, the Watch Register is on the frontline of international efforts to trace stolen timepieces.
It aims to make life more difficult the sophisticated gangs who specialise in spotting the most sought-after watches on the wrists of victims in chic restaurants and nightspots, before dispatching moped or motorbike-mounted “cutters” to rip the items from their targets, often at knifepoint.
The organisation, which earns the bulk of its revenues by charging a fee for retailers to check watches being offered for sale against its database, is seeing a significant degree of success. It last year located some 620 lost, stolen or counterfeit watches, more than double the figure in 2020, and prevented stolen or lost goods worth £3m from reaching sale.
But those at the sharp end of the battle against the so-called “Rolex rippers” say that, in one crucial sense, they are fighting against the economics of the luxury watch industry.
Such is the level of demand for the most sought-after brands and their most coveted lines that many now operate waiting lists, some reputedly extending for a decade or more.
This pent-up demand leads to a phenomenon whereby pre-owned examples of some models now routinely fetch prices three to five times the original sale price, as deep-pocketed customers seek to jump the waiting lists.
For example, a Patek Nautilus 5811 in white gold, released last year with a list price of £56,000, is now routinely listed on secondhand retail sites at £150,000.
A slightly different version of the same watch, sold for $35,000 (£28,000), was last year being offered for re-sale with a price tag of more than $500,000.
For watch brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piquet, the number of wannabe buyers has outstripped supply for years. Numerous other brands, including Omega, Cartier and IWC, also have waiting lists for some of their products.
Brands point out that long waiting times for luxury goods are nothing new – Hermès reportedly no longer even keeps a waiting list for its renowned Birkin bags, leaving it to its boutiques to build relationships with customers seeking the limited supply. And the elite watch houses argue they cannot easily boost production of timepieces that are handmade and require exquisite craftsmanship.
But this is where watch thieves have spotter their opportunity.
Katya Hills, the chief executive of Watch Register, told i: “Many people can’t actually buy the watch they want brand new, so they have to turn to the pre-owned market to purchase it. And because that market is so strong and growing stronger, the thieves know they have a place to sell their stolen goods for a very healthy price – often three, four, if not more times the value of brand new.
“So you could purchase something one day for £20,000 and re-sell it the next day for £90,000. And thieves have cottoned on to this, it is a no-brainer for them. They can make a very healthy return.”
Organised gangs, with roots as far-flung as Colombia and Naples, will aim to sell on timepieces within hours, leaving the country where a theft has been carried out, often with their ill-gotten gains on their wrist.
The items are then passed to a network of middlemen who in turn seek to profit by returning watches to the buoyant secondhand market.
In order to disrupt this model, recovery experts deploy their main weapon – the unique serial code to be found on the back of expensive watches, and in some cases within the mechanism.
Once this information is entered onto databases such as the Watch Register and a new registration scheme run by luxury conglomerate Richemont, it can be instantly flagged if and when a “ripped” timepiece is offered for sale.
At the same time, however, there is evidence that the criminal gangs behind the watch snatching are developing their own networks of disposals and “after-sales service”.
An industry insider told i that in order to avoid the legitimate pre-owned market, thieves are exporting their examples of Swiss precision engineering to locations such as the Far East, Dubai and Georgia.
Watches are also ending up in Russia, where a once vibrant market for blingy timepieces has been dented by western sanctions, leaving oligarchs to search elsewhere for their wrist-worn status symbols.
The insider said: “It is like any criminal enterprise, as we try to restrict one source of income, the thieves adapt their methods. If the gangs can’t find buyers in London, then they will find them in St Petersburg, Shanghai or wherever there is plausible demand. Human nature is, I’m afraid, attracted to beautiful and valuable objects, especially if they come at a bargain price.”
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