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At some point, staff at the store realized it had been a ruse.

The man didn’t actually pay for anything. The receipt he waved around wasn’t really a receipt. According to court documents, he hit cancel after inserting his bank card, so the machine printed out an itemized record of the cancelled transaction, which looked a lot like a receipt but wasn’t. 

The man had been seen pulling the same scam at the same Milton store a month before. A few weeks later, two women did the same thing and walked out of a different Shoppers location in Milton with more than $5,800 in grooming products, vitamins, towels and groceries. It happened again two days later at a Shoppers in Brampton.

In late summer 2022, the security team at Loblaw Companies, the Canadian retail giant that owns Shoppers Drug Mart, realized the situation was much worse than they thought. 

A string of thefts had used the same handful of bank cards at the self-checkout machines. So the analysts checked the Shoppers database to see how many times the cards had been used. According to that analysis, the cancelled receipt trick had been used more than 1,000 times across Ontario, going back at least six months.

“They hit us in 148 stores,” said Dean Henrico, the senior vice-president of asset protection at Loblaw. 

Using surveillance footage, Henrico’s team was able to piece together images of a group of suspects they believed were hitting the stores over and over. By late fall, Shoppers Drug Mart and police believed the group had stolen more than $1.9 million worth of merchandise. 

Since the pandemic, big-box retailers say sophisticated, brazen crime rings have been stealing millions of dollars worth of merchandise, then reselling the stolen goods to unsuspecting customers on online marketplaces like Amazon. And while stores and police sometimes catch the runners, they rarely get close to whoever is at the centre of the ring, making the real money.

“Capturing the kingpin, or the mastermind, is extremely difficult,” Henrico said. 

But this time, Henrico said, his team caught a break — leading to the biggest police takedown  ever at Shoppers Drug Mart.

***

By mid-September, Henrico’s team thought they had something.

Two security analysts from Shoppers went to Halton Police headquarters in Oakville to meet an officer, Const. Sean Neglia, in the retail theft unit.

The analysts had been over the hundreds of thefts going back to February 2022. And the suspects were seen in or around a silver sedan “on 17 occasions,” Neglia recalled in an Information to Obtain a Search Warrant, or ITO — a document in which investigators lay out their case for a judge, asking for permission for a warrant. (The Star obtained a court order to unseal ITOs filed in the case and details from those documents are included in this story. The allegations contained in the ITOs were never tested in court.)

On the day of the meeting in Oakville, the analysts didn’t have licence plates for the sedans. But police in York Region had already started looking at a silver Nissan Maxima with Quebec plates, driven by two suspects in a Shoppers Drug Mart theft in Richmond Hill, who had made off with $5,000 in product using the “same, unique modus operandi,” Neglia wrote.

A few weeks later, Shoppers Drug Mart emailed the Halton retail theft unit with licence plate info for two more Nissan sedans, both from Quebec. 

“Once we had licence plates, I mean, that’s a phenomenal starting point,” Henrico said in an interview. 

The cars were registered to addresses in Brampton. So police started watching the homes, and noted that the people leaving and entering looked like the suspects seen in video stills from Shoppers Drug Mart security cameras. Officers followed them to storage lockers and jewelry stores, where Neglia said he believed the suspects were converting the cash they made from selling stolen goods into jewelry. The theory, he said, was that jewelry allowed them to conceal their source of income and “wear their proceeds” when travelling back to Czech Republic, where police believed the suspects were from.

On one day in October, officers spent hours tailing one of the silver sedans for more than 250 kilometres, from Brampton to Napanee, Ont., watching as three women in the car stole from four Shoppers Drug Marts, Neglia wrote. As police continued to track the suspects, officers noticed they were dropping off bags to the same man. They were seen meeting him about half a dozen times.

In the ITOs, Neglia identified the man as Satnampal Chawla. 

“On a typical afternoon,” Neglia wrote in the ITO, ”(surveillance) officers observed Chawla meet multiple people in industrial parking lots and accept reusable bags filled with property I believe had been previously stolen.”

Chawla had a warehouse in an industrial park in Brampton, not far from the airport. Police watched “numerous individuals” dropping off bags at the warehouse, Neglia said. On one afternoon in late October, a surveillance team got a glimpse inside the warehouse. Neglia said they saw products that “matched what was stolen from Shoppers Drug Mart.” Around 2:30 p.m., a Canada Post van arrived to pick up boxes, which Neglia believed were stolen goods that were being shipped to unsuspecting customers.

A few days later, Neglia said he learned that a Mercedes in Chawla’s driveway was registered to a numbered company. Chawla was the only director of the company and it was registered to do business under the name Buynsel.

Neglia said he Googled “Buynsel.”

“The first result was linked to Amazon,” he wrote.

Looking at Buynsel’s Amazon page, Neglia recalled seeing products listed for sale that matched what had been stolen from Shoppers.

***

In late 2022, a few weeks before Christmas, investigators got a search warrant and raided the Buynsel warehouse, along with several residences, vehicles, storage lockers and safety deposit boxes.

Officers found the Buynsel warehouse was “heavily fortified,” Neglia wrote later, in an ITO requesting additional search warrants.

A police photo of the scene shows metal bars across the bay door. Inside, there were boxes everywhere, on the floor, on a folding table, on wooden shelves.

According to Neglia, police entered the warehouse and seized thousands of products, which appeared to originate from Shoppers Drug Mart and other retailers, including Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes and Apple. There were also bottles of adhesive remover, which Neglia said he believed was used to peel off security tags.

All together, the items seized at the warehouse filled two shipping containers, Neglia said in an ITO, estimating the total value to be around $1 million. 

Around the same time as the raid, police served a production order to Amazon, requesting information about how much of Buynsel’s inventory was being stored in Amazon’s warehouses. An executive at Amazon provided a spreadsheet listing each product, Neglia said.

There were more than 12,000 products in total, stored in Amazon warehouses across the country. After police got a search warrant, Amazon handed it all back — ovulation tests, prenatal vitamins, packs of Nicorette, anti-snoring devices, light bulbs, Fitbits, coffee makers, power drills, toilet seats, from a dozen warehouses in or around almost every major city in Canada.

Police estimated the value of the goods Buynsel sold on Amazon to be around $8 million, according to Sgt. Rob Felske, who led the investigation for the Halton retail theft unit.

“Amazon has zero tolerance for the sale of stolen goods,” company spokesperson Octavia Roufogalis said in an email, adding that the company worked with police “to take enforcement actions against the bad actor, and we facilitated the return of all stolen goods.”

By the time of the seizure orders, Amazon said it was already onto Buynsel, and had banned the seller from offering certain products.

According to the ITOs, police found “multiple messages” from Amazon to Buynsel on a phone seized at Chawla’s house. Major brands only allow their products to be sold by authorized dealers. The messages on Chawla’s phone showed Amazon had delisted several products from Buynsel because it couldn’t provide proof it was a legitimate dealer, according to the ITOs. 

“I believe Buynsel/Chawla did not have any supplier agreements,” Neglia wrote.

****

In late 2022, police charged Chawla, along with 10 others who are alleged to be the runners who stole from Shoppers and passed the products to Buynsel.

According to Michael Czuma, one of the defence lawyers in the case, the group of 10 were largely Roma people, who worked as freelancers and didn’t make a lot of money.

Richard Fedorowicz, another defence lawyer in the case, said his client was “quite frankly taken advantage of.”

“You’re looking (at) someone who is traditionally marginalized, who is here trying to do her best, and make ends meet in a new country,” he said. “Someone took advantage of that position.”

As of last month, the 10 runners had all been found guilty of at least one charge: either theft, possession or trafficking of stolen goods. The crown withdrew all other charges against the runners, including participating in organized crime, and each received a conditional sentence of five to six months, meaning they’ll face jail time if they violate a set of court-appointed rules.

In most cases, those conditions include a period of house arrest and a ban from Shoppers Drug Mart. And in some cases, the crown also agreed to return personal property that had been seized during the raids, including jewelry.

Fedorowicz said the conditional sentence shouldn’t be seen as a break. It’s a serious sentence that comes with a criminal record, he said, but it also allows his client to serve her time without being a drain on tax dollars, since there’s no concern about public safety. 

“Why are you going to use a sledgehammer if a mallet is just as effective?” 

Chawla was found guilty on charges including possession and trafficking stolen property. He is scheduled be sentenced later this month. Through his lawyer, he declined to comment on this story.

Henrico, the head of security for Loblaw, said the way this case has played out so far, with the court handing out conditional sentences, makes it easier to understand why these types of thefts keep happening in stores across the country.

“The perfect example is the case you have in front of you,” he said, adding that thefts at stores across the Loblaw network have increased 228 per cent over the last five years. “The sophistication is unprecedented. We’ve never seen this in Canada.”

In the spring of 2023, police started getting Buynsel products from Amazon, and sending them back to the stores they were believed to have been stolen from. Police laid out all the returns in a report that spans more than 100 pages. In mid-March, for example, 10 “no bark” collars for large dogs were returned to Canadian Tire from an Amazon warehouse in Ottawa. Later that month, Home Depot got back more than 100 circuit breakers, transported from a warehouse in Richmond, B.C. Eight doorbells went back to Best Buy. Dozens of ink cartridges went to Walmart. And Shoppers Drug Mart got reams of electric toothbrushes and whitening kits.

“We actually got some money back,” Henrico said. “Not all cases end like this.”