Retail thieves push out trolleys full of unpaid items

Marketing @ SAI Group -

Organized retail crime (ORC) has increasingly become a significant threat to retail businesses across the UK. Numerous incidents have highlighted the audacity and sophistication of these crimes, emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced security measures in retail stores. In a recent development, the police busted a shoplifting gang that stole goods worth £130,000 across 857 shopping trollies across the southern region of UK.

Most of the items that are stolen in organized retail crime incidents comprise high-value items that can be easily resold. Electronics such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops are prime targets due to their high market demand. Designer clothing and accessories, jewellery luxury watches, cosmetics, and perfumes also feature prominently, with thieves seeking items that yield high profits in secondary markets.

Rising inflation and cost of living crisis are factors that have made grocery retailers easy targets for shoplifting. Quite a few incidents involve brazen shoplifting with shoppers pushing out carts full of stolen items and walking out of the stores unchallenged.

One thing is clear – thieves are getting emboldened by the belief that they will never get caught even though all the evidence is captured in CCTV recordings.

Challenges in reporting and responding to incidents

While CCTV recording is available in all of these cases, the time taken to extract the relevant footage and reporting such incidents to the police provides sufficient time for the thieves to escape.

A closer look at the trends also point to some level of sophistication in these crimes – several of these incidents are happening concurrently. When theft is reported from multiple locations around the same time, it becomes a challenge for the police – they cannot launch a coordinated response.

Real-time detection of cart pushouts - an industry first capability

At SAI Group, our focus has been to enable real-time detection of suspicious customer behaviour in the store. Our visual AI platform uses sophisticated pretrained models to analyze live video feeds from the store's existing CCTV cameras and detect scenarios. Ours is the only technology solution that can identify and provide evidence of incidents involving cart pushouts.

SAI Group's visual AI platform sends timely notifications to the store staff on their handheld terminals, with links to relevant video footage extracted after analysis of the live CCTV feeds.

Adopt visual AI with confidence

3 of UK's top 5 retail companies currently use SAI Group's visual AI platform across their network of stores. They have also realized ROI within a few months of deploying the visual AI platform.

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Join us in our mission to create safer retail environments. Let's work together to build a safer, more welcoming retail world for all.

About SAI

As a leader in computer vision technology, SAI Group delivers cutting-edge, multi-modal AI solutions into retail environments. Using a unique platform approach, its technology uses existing camera systems to target losses, increase store safety, and underpin operational efficiencies.

All solutions are built from the ground up to ensure the highest levels of security and data protection, respecting the privacy expectations of the public and operating to stringent ethical standards while delivering substantial value to our clients. Globally, SAI monitors millions of transactions per day, protecting the revenues from tens of millions of product sales and hundreds of millions of customer interactions. Its models also accurately identify anti-social behaviour, aggression and violence, helping to de-escalate situations with real-time interfaces to security officers and operations centres.