Facebook Marketplace Used By Retail Theft Ring To Sell Stolen Goods

Police say retail theft is becoming a massive and organized industry. Internet-savvy criminals are allegedly shoplifting expensive items from big-box retailers and then selling them on Facebook Marketplace and other similar sites.

Detective Sgt. Todd Curtis of the Perrysburg Township Police Department located in Ohio is one of three investigators who is a part of busting organized shoplifting rings. This was long before numerous cities acknowledged the growing problem in recent weeks.

Curtis recently helped bust and arrest a 44-year-old man who is accused of selling a stolen Husqvarna chainsaw on the social media Marketplace after local Lowe’s and Home Depot made several reports that a shoplifting crew hit their stores.

For the past twenty years now, law enforcement has grappled with keeping up as platforms succeeded one another as the preferred marketplace for stolen goods. But now, law enforcement agencies believe Facebook Marketplace has increasingly become the go-to destination for organized rings because it’s easier for criminals to offload their stolen goods. The platform has also already earned a reputation among investigators for being too slow to respond and cooperate. Therefore, officers are left to give up or invent workarounds.

“It’s just a perfect storm of a lot of bad things being enabled all at once,” said Sucharita Kodali, a principal analyst at Forrester, a market research firm. “The fact that they’re so prevalent, the fact that there is absolutely no regulation around them, the fact that the marketplaces themselves are explicitly exonerated from illicit activity, which is a huge, huge flaw.”

NBC Miami reported that California, Illinois, and other states work to reassess their work of scaling back property crime enforcement as viral videos circulate featuring “smash-and-grabs” at high-end shops across the country.