Industry Focus
Sitting on the Fence as Part of a New Campaign to Kill “Hooky Street”
NBCS’s Operation Sale Targets “Del Boy” Culture in Campaign Against Sale of Illicit Goods
“No income tax, no VAT
No money back, no guarantee
Black or white, rich or broke
We’ll cut prices at a stroke
God bless Hooky Street
Viva Hooky Street
Long live Hooky Street
C’est magnifique, Hooky Street
Magnifique, Hooky Street……”
And so goes the all-too recognisable and catchy theme tune in the opening credits of the timeless sit-com Only Fools and Horses which attracted tens of millions of viewers in the iconic series’ twenty-two-year run between 1981 and 2003.
The premise of the show was about the life and times of loveable rogues Del Boy and Rodney Trotter who made their living from selling “hooky” goods from Peckham market—items that would have euphemistically “fallen off the back of a lorry” with “no questions asked” as to their provenance.
The show was full of pathos with their precarious high-rise and high-risk lifestyle only lasting for as long as their rusty yellow three-wheel Robin Reliant was roadworthy—or legal—or until such time that they struck it lucky as the millionaires they had always dreamt of becoming.
The word “theft” or “fence” was never written into the John Sullivan scripts of this multi-award winning series which gave the brothers an air of legitimacy, as they never stole the items in question, but instead were the hapless middle-men, the fall guys in a tragi-comic set of scenarios and outcomes, which needless to say never amounted to much.
Operation Sale
However, the Del and Rodney Trotters of this world are, in reality, a less likeable product of today’s burgeoning black market in illicit stolen goods.
Research carried out by the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) categorises the Trotters as widely perceived as harmless “hawkers”—those who fence and sell items directly to consumers through car boot markets, door-to-door, or in pubs and clubs and seemingly anonymously online. They are however far from harmless and form a vital lynch pin propping up the black and grey market because of their thin consumer veneer of legitimacy.
“There is little sympathy for shoplifters and store thieves among the buying public, but there is a fondness for the “Del Boys” of this world who are seen as entrepreneurial cheeky chappies trying to make a living in tough times,” said Stephen Gray, the NBCS’s head of data and intelligence.
Very little is known about the extent of the market since criminologist Professor Martin Gill of Perpetuity Research, in conjunction with Gillette, published a forty-six-page global impact report “The Illicit Market in Stolen Fast Moving Consumer Goods”, which then attached the global price tag of over $56 billion (£47 billion) to the problem, representing a conservative figure of 1.38 per cent of global sales.
Now, with the intervening advent of the internet and the evolution of global supply chains and organised retail crime gang modus operandi (MO), Professor Gill is looking to reprise the report and bring it up to date.
“It is still a major catastrophic problem, but we now want to look at how the extent and reach of the internet has made a difference as well how supply chains and loss prevention practices have had to adapt,” Professor Gill told Loss Prevention Magazine Europe in the summer 2025 issue of the publication.
The premise of a new report, he said, would remain the same—the disruption of this lucrative black market by reducing vulnerabilities in their supply chains to “choke off” losses through fear of arrest, as well as education and commercial pressure on buyers and “fences” who move items through the illicit supply chain.
In his 2004 report introduction, Professor Gill writes: “We all suffer the consequences of the trade in stolen goods. Some, such as the retail employee who is robbed or attacked by shop thieves in their bids to supply illicit markets, are directly affected”.
“All over the world, citizens suffer from loss of the taxation revenue which illicit traders avoid, and from the price rises which licit retailers inevitably try to impose to recoup some of their losses. Perhaps most sinister of all, there is evidence that many of those involved in illicit trading are members of organised crime syndicates and that their operations help to fund terrorism”.
Professor Gill is now seeking to re-explore how this has changed and what we might learn in 2025 and beyond. The underlying theme of an updated report would remain the same in that the structure of the illicit market in FMCG is far from simple.
And there would arguably be a working hypothesis that the growth in online shopping and social media in the intervening years had amplified the complexity of the issues.
“We now want to look again at the changing face of technology in the global context,” Professor Gill added.
Operation Sale has already broken new ground in this area and proven that hypothesis looking into the illicit market through a more recent global study from Arizona State University which mirrors the views expressed by the NBCS.
The report authors argue: “Whereas most citizens are intolerant of thieves and of stealing, they tend to be more tolerant of stolen goods buyers and sellers because they are seen as entrepreneurs providing the valuable local service of making goods available at bargain prices”.
“In addition, many so called “ordinary folks” ask no questions or accept the standard “it fell off a truck” lines, when offered deeply discounted valuables. Even if they do not buy, most are unlikely to report people selling goods in this way. Police cannot afford to ignore the prevailing community attitudes toward buying stolen goods”.
Over the last six months the NBCS has been carrying out its own research into the different types of fencing and handling and highlighting incidents through collaborative information sharing intelligence and investigative work.
Apart from “hawkers”, there are a number of different dispersal routes for illicit items which include commercial fences—those who pass on stolen items to existing shops as part of a lucrative side hustle in selling hooky goods alongside their legitimate stock.
In addition, there are also residential fences, those resellers of stolen property brazenly using their own homes as a shop front. Network sellers are those who buy stolen items with a view to passing them onto another seller, while the “exchange market” is the practice of selling stolen items direct to commercial markets. Likewise, commercial sales involve bulk selling of illicit items direct to consumers or another distributor further upstream.
Summary of Findings
The NBCS conducted a survey of almost fifty retailers who gather intelligence and track stolen items, almost 30 per cent of which utilise tools such as RFID tagging or DNA marking. More than 66 per cent believed their goods were ending up in car boot sales.
Working with thirteen different police forces, four Government agencies, and thirteen Business Improvement Districts, the NBCS has been researching the problem in some detail and has distilled them into key findings.
Firstly, the attention of law enforcement is always on the thief rather than the fence, meaning the handlers and consumers of those products are able to operate with relative impunity. Trading Standards departments which operate to penetrate such activities are often overwhelmed by different priorities as a result of local authority cuts.
This leans into the Del Boy hypothesis of the likeable and useful local rogue as well as the fact that consumers who benefit from these cut price “no questions asked” transactions are less likely to report such incidents for fear of losing their own supply of hooky items.
“Stealing to order is not as common as stealing to offer. Thieves generally prefer to sell stolen items locally and often within thirty minutes of the theft taking place which may be linked to drug or alcohol dependencies,” said Stephen.
“In the meantime, drug dealers are less likely to exchange stolen items for drugs meaning their customers have to commit more crime in order to secure a fix.”
Hawking
Part of the NBCS’s extensive research involved undercover operations and surveillance at car boot sales which are often held in large open fields or spaces.
“We found that these large venues were also in breach of other regulations such as Martyn’s Law where venues with more than two hundred people are gathering have to implement measures to mitigate the risk of harm to the public during a terrorist attack,” he said.
Stolen items on open display in fields were filmed, along with dozens of test purchases to highlight the extent of the market threat.
“It is easy to come along with a van, pay for your pitch and sell thousands of illegal items off a trestle table or even tarpaulin on the ground,” he added.
At one hawking location, seventeen vehicles of interest linked to shoplifting offences—one third of the vehicles at the site on that day—were identified during undercover surveillance.
Across the UK, a total of fifty-four known vehicles were identified at car boot locations usually located in large open spaces.
During the six-month operation, sixty-seven test purchases were made as part of the investigation. In addition, the surveillance revealed that twenty-seven offenders already known to NBCS with stock belonging to no less than fifty-six retailers were identified.
“These are large open locations making tens of thousands of pounds in just a few hours with no restrictions or evidence of police or Trading Standards presence,” said Stephen.
“Apart from anything, they are open sites which should fall under Martyn’s Law like any other legitimate location for large gatherings.”
Links to More Serious Offences
Around 12 per cent of the retailer’s polled believed their items were involved in funding more serious crime. Operation Sale also focused upon links to serious organised activity. In one of its sting operations—Operation Zambia—it targeted what was ostensibly an innocuous female seller offering items on Facebook Marketplace. She was working as part of a wider team who were also arrested and sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended sentence.
At the time of her arrest, the perpetrator’s vehicle had been operating extensively across the West Midlands and was linked to multiple thefts from seventeen different retailers. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended sentence.
Gift Card Draining
Operation Yemen, a campaign looking into organised criminality identified a multi-million “gift card draining” scam. A crime that has been imported from the US, it is believed to be linked to a multi-million-dollar OCG. In just one scam, $40 million worth of theft was identified as part of retail theft funding wider international criminality.
The scam works when thieves steal the cards, which are often left hanging on the ends of supermarket shelves—sometimes swiping hundreds at one time. They then take them away, scratch off the silver foil that obscures the validation code and copy down the numbers.
The card is glued back on to the paper packaging, so as not to arouse suspicion. Alternatively, thieves sometimes purchase silver foil stickers online which make the card appear unused. The cards are then snuck back into the shop where they were taken from.
Gift cards are worthless when they are sitting on the shelves and are only topped up with cash once a customer picks them up and takes them to the till.
But once this happens, the criminals—armed with the validation codes—pounce to drain the amounts loaded, exploiting the fact that there is usually a gap of days, weeks, and even months before the voucher will be spent.
It works particularly well around Christmas, as the fraudsters can bank on the fact that the recipients won’t try and spend the money until at least 25 December, but it can happen at any time of year.
As part of Operation Yemen, over thirty-five individuals were highlighted in March 2025. They were travelling extensively across the UK using hire vehicles to visit several large retail stores and committing more than one hundred incidents of gift card thefts over a four-week period.
There were seven teams working out of Birmingham and identified as one large, organised crime gang (OCG) which was involved in other offences including forecourt garage drive-offs (bilking) and burglary.
On 10 July 2025, the NBCS Intelligence Team, Leicestershire Police, and colleagues of an NBCS fashion member conducted a covert operation targeting a potential handler of retail stolen goods.
The NBCS had received information that the occupants of an address were involved in handling stolen goods from several retailers. A full intelligence package was created on the occupants and officers from the NBCS conducted several test purchases, targeting items they had identified as belonging to the fashion retailer. The officers attended the address and paid £60 for five items, the retail price of which was £158.00.
Leicestershire Police were alerted and attended the address where officers conducted a thorough house search and recovered over £4,000 worth of brand-new stolen clothing. It was identified as belonging to two fashion members, one food member, and one fashion non-member.
Police are now working through the phones seized as part of the investigation, and have some strong intelligence leads.
“This is a great example of how the NBCS wants to help with the collation of intelligence regarding stolen goods that can be developed and handed to police for proactive and effective corrective action,” said Stephen Gray.
Supply Chain Crime
But Operation Sale stretches beyond theft and handling of stolen goods from shops. Many retail businesses lose items destined for stores either en-route or in distribution centres as a result of criminal activity and the subsequent fencing of those items.
In one incident, a seller advertising high value sportswear for sale through an online market site was identified as a result of the labels that appeared in the sale images which pinpointed where they had originated from. The impacted retailer was able to identify that the items for sale had started their journey from the same depot and further checks revealed that the items had been reported as “not delivered”.
Test purchases carried out by NBCS identified the seller as an “innocent party” who had purchased the items at a car boot sale which prompted an investigation of the market located in south Yorkshire which resulted in the identification of a suspect. A test purchase was carried out via WhatsApp and the suspect, a delivery driver who advertised a wholesale price of £2,500, was arrested. He is awaiting a court outcome.
Outside of Operation Sale, there are some reported victories for over-stretched police and Trading Standards, but this is not a uniform picture across the UK.
In the spring, Havering Council’s Trading Standards and enforcement officers seized thousands of pounds worth of counterfeit products and unsafe vapes from the Bonzer car boot sale.
Working alongside the Metropolitan Police in a joint operation on 1 May 2025, council officers targeted individuals and traders selling unsafe counterfeit, stolen, or illegal goods.
One was selling suspected counterfeit and potentially unsafe perfumes and fragrances, plus electrical items. The other two stalls were found to be selling illegal vapes that did not meet UK regulations.
A total of £12,600 worth of counterfeit and unsafe products were seized, along with £5,400 worth of non-compliant vapes.
Police also seized around half a million pounds worth of suspected stolen tools overall.
They made six arrests and recovered around 1,500 items at the boot sale and a further 159 tools were seized during another search at a property in Hackney.
The intelligence-led activity was carried out in response to concerns from tradespeople about tool theft.
Inspector Mark Connolly, from the Havering Safer Neighbourhood Team who led the operation, said: “We know tool theft has a significant impact on tradespeople and we’re working hard across the Met to tackle it through targeted operations such as this as well as prevention with those directly affected.”
“While victims have their livelihoods disrupted, organised crime groups are making significant money from selling on suspected stolen tools and we won’t stand for it.”
“We will continue to take action against those who make the lives of Londoners a misery through this type of offending.”
Four men and two women, aged between twenty-five and sixty, from Hackney, Newham, and Kent were arrested on suspicion of handling stolen goods.
Operation Sale Next Steps
Stephen Gray now wants to work with police, Trading Standards, and BIDs as well as members and non-members to steer more resources towards the grey market in the fencing of stolen goods. Stretched police forces and Trading Standards departments do not have the capability or the manpower to tackle the issue alone, and with ever-evolving theft and disposal scams emerging, more research such as that conducted by Professor Martin Gill is required to identify the bigger picture.
It requires a wider retail response and research into the well-trodden disposal routes that feed the market in stolen goods. But education is essential as well as lobbying for more resources. While the NBCS is planning Operation Sale’s next steps in the autumn for greater engagement around the issue, the overall message has to focus around changing the popular mindset around loveable rogues “getting by”.
This is simply because Del Boy’s recurring narrative of: “one day Rodney, we’ll be millionaires” is already a reality for the organised criminal gangs that are profiting from the growing sale of stolen goods.
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