How organized shoplifting rings work, and how police in one Ohio town are fighting back

PERRYSBURG TOWNSHIP, Ohio — He called himself Rick Nye, at least on Facebook Marketplace. His friendly profile picture featured a little girl giving him a hug. His page was filled with great deals — deeply discounted power tools still in the box. 

Nye’s social media presence was unremarkable for a man from this suburb just south of Toledo. He looked like just another guy who had extra equipment to offload. 

Someone wanted the Husqvarna chainsaw he had advertised for $250, nearly half off the sticker price at the nearby Lowe’s. Nye agreed to meet his customer at a parking lot near the Baymont Inn. The buyer got a new chainsaw, and Nye drove off in his Ford F-150 with a fresh wad of bills. 

The next day Nye, 44, was behind bars; he was eventually charged with helping to lead an organized crime ring that spanned Michigan and Ohio. He is now in state prison serving a five-year sentence for his role in what police say is a growing illegal industry: massive, organized retail theft, in which internet-savvy criminals shoplift pricey items from the shelves of big-box retailers. They sell the loot on Facebook Marketplace and similar sites.

“It’s big money,” said Detective Sgt. Todd Curtis of the Perrysburg Township Police Department. Curtis was posing as a landscaper the day he bought the stolen chainsaw. “We’re not going to put up with it. We’re not going to tolerate it.”

Curtis is one of a trio of investigators in the 23-officer department who began busting organized shoplifting rings long before a wave of cities began acknowledging the problem in recent weeks. California, Illinois and other states are reassessing their yearslong push to scale back property crime enforcement as viral videos circulate featuring “smash-and-grabs” at high-end shops across the country. 

What’s being overlooked, law enforcement officials and big tech watchdogs say, is the role online resale sites play in the surge. 

Before the world was wired, people who resold items, stolen or not, usually had to use their names or show their faces. They bought classified ads in newspapers or went to pawn shops. 

The internet changed everything. For the past two decades, law enforcement has struggled to keep up as one platform succeeded another as the preferred marketplace for stolen goods. Craigslist has continued to let users sell things anonymously, but it fell out of favor with the public as competing sites began to crop up, said Peter Zollman, the founding principal of the AIM Group, which tracks classified advertising. EBay also garnered criticism for hosting illegal activity, but officers now praise the company for accommodating them when needed. 

In recent years, police say, Facebook Marketplace has increasingly become a go-to destination for organized rings that sell items ripped from big-box store shelves. In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Marketplace had hit 1 billion monthly users worldwide and expected the trend to continue. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said, “Organized retail crime is an industry-wide challenge and preventing it requires ongoing collaboration between retailers, law enforcement and online marketplaces.”

E-commerce experts said that as Facebook Marketplace grows, its oversight isn’t keeping up. Among law enforcement agencies, the company has already gained a reputation for being so slow to respond and cooperate that investigators often have to give up or invent workarounds.

Industry watchers say online marketplaces make it easy for criminals to offload their loot with ease. 

“It’s just a perfect storm of a lot of bad things being enabled all at once,” said Sucharita Kodali, a principal analyst at Forrester, a market research firm. “The fact that they’re so prevalent, the fact that there is absolutely no regulation around them, the fact that the marketplaces themselves are explicitly exonerated from illicit activity, which is a huge, huge flaw.”

Kodali noted that current federal law protects internet companies from liability for most messages that people post on their sites.

Critics say complaints from law enforcement are yet another example of Meta’s unleashing forces it can’t control. Facebook has been blasted for amplifying conspiracy theories and extremism with its algorithms, and now it seems to have become America’s favorite new fence.

“It’s starting to look like whoever can exploit Facebook the most wins,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor who has tracked Meta’s growth over the years. “Anything goes, selling drugs, selling weapons, fencing goods.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with the Meta business model,” she said.

Few outside northwestern Ohio have ever heard of Perrysburg Township, an overwhelmingly white community of about 13,000 people dotted with farms and big-box stores — Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s and Walmart. But residents call their home the “Crossroads of America,” because it sits off both the Ohio Turnpike and Interstate 75, a highway that runs all the way from Detroit to Tampa, Florida. Shoplifting crews are drawn to the area because it’s easy to steal in and even easier to drive away from, police and big-box retailers say.

Store surveillance video from Perrysburg Township shows a far different image from the one in viral videos featuring young people from big cities wielding sledgehammers. Shoplifters here are mostly white men in their 30s and 40s suffering from drug addiction, police say, who calmly walk in and then out of stores with stolen goods, blending in with other shoppers.

Shoplifting rings often pay workers in crack, heroin or cash to swipe power tools from stores, said David Skrepenski, who said he recruited thieves for Nye but didn’t do drugs himself.

“You make more money than you do selling drugs, and it’s less jail time,” Skrepenski said from inside an Ohio prison where he is serving four years for theft. Before he was arrested, Skrepenski said, he could make $2,500 a day swiping power tools and selling the loot to ring leaders. “It’s an easy fast dollar.”

In the early stages of investigating a shoplifting ring, Perrysburg Township detectives check pawn shop rolls that are digitized on the website Leads Online. After a flurry of laws were enacted during the 20th century, the resale industry became more transparent. As in many states, Ohio requires shops to keep lists of sellers’ identification details and what items they sold.

But Perrysburg Township cops rarely find any evidence in physical secondhand stores. Instead, Facebook Marketplace monopolizes their time, having become the area’s top source of illegal transactions, police said.

Local detectives say that they’ve been working on organized shoplifting cases since 2010 but that in the last few years, as Facebook Marketplace has grown in popularity, they are getting slammed. Curtis said nearly all of their investigations now involve suspects who sell their stolen items on the site.

The local Lowe’s and Home Depot are prime targets, and shoplifters frequently walk out with expensive equipment or do a “push out” — when a thief simply fills a shopping cart with products and then pushes it out of the store.

Because many retailers encourage employees not to alert police or chase shoplifters, criminals meet little to no resistance. Corporate officials say they do that to avoid bombarding local officers with reports of petty shoplifting and, most important, to prevent employees and customers from getting hurt. 

With so few 911 shoplifting calls, undercover officers attack the problem by going on “buys” multiple times a week. They set up meet-ups in outdoor parking lots with sellers off Facebook Marketplace who offer cheap, still-in-box power tools, kitchen appliances and home improvement equipment.

That’s how Curtis met the man identified as Richard Nye in police documents back in July 2019. Store investigators with Lowe’s and Home Depot told police a shoplifting crew had hit several of their locations across Ohio and Michigan. Curtis and his team surfed Marketplace looking for clues. 

Police found a pricey chainsaw stolen from Lowe’s selling on the site for nearly half off. Curtis, posing as a landscaper, inquired about it. Nye’s Facebook alias was blown once he shared his personal cellphone number with the undercover cop.

Police…