You could be buying shoplifted stuff on Amazon, eBay, or Facebook Marketplace

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• Retail executives at companies like Target and Walmart are pointing to a spike in shoplifting.
• Experts say organized crime deserves much of the blame.

Executives at retailers like Target and Walmart are raising alarms about shoplifting in their stores — and you may have unknowingly bought one of these items when you shopped online.

That's because criminal enterprises are selling over $500 billion in stolen or counterfeit products through online marketplaces like Amazon, Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace across the globe each year, the Prosecutors Alliance of California, an advocacy organization that promotes criminal justice reforms, estimated in 2022.

If true, this would mean illicit goods account for up to 10% of the total e-commerce market.

Couple a spike in shoplifted items with the rise of online shopping in recent years, and it's possible you could be one of these unwitting customers. Given the sellers often appear legitimate — and the goods are often sold at discounted prices — many consumers are happy to do business.

Rather than being driven by a surge of one-off thieves, experts say organized criminal organizations are largely to blame, and are hurting not only the businesses they steal from, but the legitimate online sellers they're competing with.

"This is a professional criminal," Jason Brewer, the spokesperson for the Buy Safe America Coalition, a lobby group for the retail industry, previously told Insider. "They're not looking to steal food for dinner, or something they need because they can't afford it. They are stealing specific items that they know they can resell online."

Insider reached out to Amazon, eBay, Craigslist and Meta for comment. Spokespeople from both eBay and Amazon said the platforms do not allow sellers to list stolen goods and that they work with law enforcement to identify this activity.

A Meta spokesperson said Facebook Marketplace prohibits the sale of stolen items and has "specialized teams that work with law enforcement to respond to legal requests."

"We enforce our commerce policies (including reviewing complaints and reports against sellers and reports of stolen goods) through our commerce review system," they added. "While this review is largely automated, we rely on our teams to build and train these systems, and in some cases, to manually review listings."

Craigslist did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Retailers say shoplifting is on the rise

In July, a Tulsa woman pleaded guilty to her role as the leader of a 29-person retail theft organization. The group targeted stores that included Walmart, Costco, and Walgreens and sold items through sites like Amazon and eBay, netting $4.5 million in sales.

This e-fencing — the selling of stolen goods online — is not a new phenomenon. Organized retail theft increased nearly 60% between 2015 and 2020, the National Retail Federation found in a 2020 survey, costing retailers an average of over $700,000 per $1 billion in sales. In 2021, a law enforcement officer told The Wall Street Journal that Amazon "may be the largest unregulated pawnshop on the face of the planet." The apparent rise in shoplifting over the past year, however, suggests the online selling of stolen goods may be becoming more common.

In November, Target said it expected to lose $600 million in 2022 to "inventory shrink" — when stores have less on their shelves than is recorded in their inventory — much of which it attributed to organized retail crime. In December, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said theft was "higher than what it has historically been" and that stores could close if the problem did not improve.

It's not just big-box retailers that have been impacted, however. 54% of small-business owners reported an uptick in shoplifting in 2021, according to a Business.org survey of 700 small businesses, with 23% saying theft happened every day.

While there appears to be a growing problem, robust, up-to-date data on the situation can be hard to come by, and there's some evidence shoplifting hasn't surged in recent years after all. A different National Retail Federation survey released last September, for instance, found that the average "shrink rate" across the retail industry was 1.4% in 2021, down from the prior two years. On an earnings call earlier this month, Walgreens CFO James Kehoe said the company may have "cried too much" about shoplifting over the prior year, as its shrinkage rate returned to more normal levels.

Going forward, businesses are taking steps to reduce shoplifting, but it also might get harder for criminal enterprises to sell their stolen goods online.

As part of its $1.7 trillion spending package in December, Congress passed a piece of legislation retailers had been pushing for for years, one platforms like Amazon and eBay ultimately came out in support of. The Inform Act will require online marketplaces to collect and verify the government ID, tax ID, and bank account information of "high volume third party sellers" — those that make 200 or more sales or earn at least $5,000 in a given year, the hope being this will help kick some illicit sellers off online platforms.

"If the marketplaces have to start verifying the people selling on their platform and providing that information to the public, it's going to be a lot harder for people to sell stolen goods," Brewer said prior to the bill's passing.

In recent years, many online platforms have already taken steps to crack down on the selling of stolen goods. Amazon, for instance, has required all new selling accounts to undergo a more strict verification process. And in 2021, the company said it invested over $900 million as part of its efforts to combat fraud.

To what degree the legislation, along with other measures, reduces the sale of stolen goods across these platforms remains to be seen.