Industry and FBI Cooperating To Fight Organized Retail Crime

Large-scale theft, credit card fraud, gift card fraud, and cargo theft, cost the retail industry $30 billion-plus annually. In order to fight the organized crime rings responsible for those losses, the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) and the FBI’s Cleveland Field Office have established a working relationship. RILA has been instrumental in connecting the FBI with retailers in order to discuss crime networks and security, and in 2020 RILA’s senior executive vice president introduced an FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst to the director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations at CVS Health. The CVS Health investigations team was tracking national crime networks that were fencing stolen products totaling several million dollars via online marketplaces. After an initial presentation by CVS Health to the FBI intelligence team, the FBI began monitoring those networks to lay the groundwork for criminal investigations.