Home improvement stores across Florida have become the target of organized theft rings, and police have arrested three people connected to a years-long string of thefts.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office announced on Feb. 19 it has filed criminal charges against three men who allegedly operated an organized retail theft ring and stole over $100,000 worth of merchandise from Home Depot stores throughout 11 counties in south and central Florida.
The investigation revealed that Vicky Popat, Christopher Abad, and Christopher Eduardo Baglin allegedly operated as a team to switch the barcode labels on expensive roof sealers for less-expensive products.
The more expensive product, Henry 887 Tropi-Cool roof sealant, costs between $248 and $445 per unit, the attorney general’s office said. The cheaper product, Henry 345 Pre-Mixed Floor Patch, costs just $9.98 per unit. They conducted the thefts through the self-checkout stations in the stores, prosecutors said.
Typically, the three men would target two to three stores per day, switching the barcode labels on four to 16 buckets per transaction, the state said. Over the course of three years, the trio engaged in over 25 separate theft incidents to steal a total of 81 buckets of Henry 887 Tropi-Cool roof sealer.
Other Recent Arrests
This wasn’t the first time thieves targeted home improvement stores in the Sunshine State.
Just a week prior, the attorney general’s office announced that another man had been charged for allegedly engaging in a similar barcode theft scheme.
Edrey Santo Rojas is accused of stealing rolls of wire from multiple Lowe’s and Home Depot stores in 15 counties throughout Florida and the southeast United States. He would remove the authentic barcode labels from smaller rolls of wire in the same color and put them on larger rolls of wire that cost $300 to $500, prosecutors said.
After purchasing the wire using a debit card, Mr. Rojas would travel to a different store location and enter empty handed, then take wire rolls off the shelf that matched his receipt and make fraudulent in-store returns to receive a full refund.
Over a period of seven months, Mr. Rojas “committed 78 confirmed and documented thefts and fraudulent returns from multiple Lowe’s and Home Depots in nine individual judicial circuits throughout Florida,” the attorney general’s office said.
‘Thou Shall Not Steal’
Home Depot was also hit by organized theft rings in 2023.The Polk County Sheriff’s Office announced charges against six people in April 2023 following a two-year multidepartment investigation in conjunction with the attorney general’s office.
The six people were accused of renting construction equipment from Home Depot stores in central and southeast Florida and never returning it. Police said the suspects would rent equipment such as stump grinders, trenchers, mini-excavators, and utility loaders for a single day. Within hours, the suspects would disable the GPS devices installed on the units and then list the items for sale—including the trailers used to transport the equipment—on social media sites such as Facebook Marketplace.
Then in August, the attorney general’s office shut down another retail theft ring when police arrested Robert Dell, a former Pinellas County pastor, and four of his associates for allegedly stealing over $1.4 million in merchandise from Home Depot locations in multiple counties and selling the goods on eBay.
Two of Mr. Dell’s alleged co-conspirators, Daniel Mace and Jessica Wild, stole the bulk of the merchandise and brought the stolen items to Mr. Dell’s home, police said. The other two allegedly involved in the theft ring were Mr. Dell’s wife, Jaclyn Dell, and his mother, Karen Dell.
“This pastor clearly skipped over the commandment—thou shall not steal,” Ms. Moody said in a statement at the time.
In October, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) announced the arrest of 41-year-old Alain Sanchez Garcia and 39-year-old Leonardo Nunez Portal.
The pair stole over $15,000 worth of goods from several Home Depot locations in Florida by placing “high-value items, including tools, breakers, and switches” into boxes labeled as trash cans, police said.
In all, HCSO recovered a total of $15,497 worth of stolen property from Home Depot stores.
In a statement to The Epoch Times, Home Depot spokesperson Evelyn Fornes said that product shrink, and specifically organized retail crime, is an ongoing issue that has been on the rise for several years.
“Some of the most targeted items fall into the categories of wire and wiring devices, power tools and home automation products,” she said. “We have several initiatives in place to mitigate, including human and technology resources to make theft in our stores more difficult, close partnerships with law enforcement and significant efforts working with federal and state task forces to fight this problem.”
Ms. Fornes said the INFORM Consumers Act, which aims to prevent the sale of stolen items by third-party sellers, is a good start to stop professional shoplifters.
‘Smash and Grab’
According to a November 2023 study by the National Retail Federation, organized retail crime is increasing in both scope and complexity across the entire country.“The degree of severity now, it’s not just theft, it’s smash and grab,” he said. “There’s an entitlement out there that if you have it, you’ve worked hard to earn it—I want it, I’m just going to take it.”
In a statement to The Epoch Times, the Florida Attorney General’s Office said organized retail theft is plaguing American communities.
“Florida is not immune to the emerging crime trends that the rest of the nation faces, the difference is we are proactive in passing laws that strengthen protections and we ensure that these laws are enforced from arrest to prosecution,” the agency said. “In other states, thieves get to routinely walk into businesses and take what they want with little to no fear of legitimate consequences, not in Florida.”
