ThinkLP Senior Director of Loss Prevention and LPM Vendor Advisory Board Member Tony Sheppard was featured in a Newsweek story on Sunday about how organized crime became a billion-dollar industry.
Sheppard told Newsweek the proportions of the sources of shrink have changed drastically over the last ten years, shifting from internal theft to external theft, largely thanks to organized retail crime.
“COVID-19 caused a significant spike in ORC in the US, and not necessarily for the reasons you may think as far as people being out of work,” Sheppard says in the story. “A lot of customers that would normally never shop online, were forced to shop online, because they wouldn’t leave their house…or they wanted something that wasn’t non-essential. So you had a massive uptick in people making online purchases, which is where a lot of the stolen product ends up. The activity skyrocketed to meet the demand from the consumer.”
