Ben Dugan was sitting in an unmarked sedan in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood one day in September, waiting for the CVS to be broken into.
He followed a man into the store and saw the thief put over $ 1,000 worth of allergy medicine in a trash bag, got out and did the same at two other nearby stores, before loading them into a pickup truck waiting, Mr. Dugan recalls.
The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, called boosters, that CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company estimated the group was responsible for the theft of nearly $ 50 million worth of product over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California. The job of Mr. Dugan, CVS Health Corp.’s lead investigator, was to stop them.
Retailers spend millions a year fighting organized crime networks that steal wholesale from their stores and then peddle the goods online, often on Amazon. The retail platform of com Inc., according to retail investigators, law enforcement officers and court documents. It’s a threat that has been supercharged by the pandemic and the rapid growth in e-commerce that has accompanied it.
“We try to control it as best we can, but it gets bigger every day,” Dugan said.
