Ogling the homes of the uber-wealthy is not just the preserve of these property pages. Criminals have been targeting their properties in a series of headline-grabbing burglary sprees. Jack Grealish, Kurt Zouma, Joelinton and Raheem Sterling are some of the scores of elite footballers who have been targeted.
Frank Lampard was targeted by the same gang that took £25 million of jewellery from Tamara Ecclestone’s Kensington mansion. The Beckhams ordered a security overhaul for their west London home after a burglar broke in undetected while they were at home. Simon Cowell put his multimillion-pound home in Holland Park on the market and left London altogether because his family were living in “constant fear” following a string of burglaries.
In response, the wealthy are beefing up their home security, installing CCTV cameras, bringing in security patrols and canine units, and hiring close protection operators. But any one of these measures can fail in the face of a determined burglar, warns Jeff Hill, head of protects for luxury estate agency The Private Office: Real Estate.
Hill knows a thing or two about what he terms “sophisticated career criminals”. A former detective chief superintendent, Hill’s 30-year career in the police saw him commanding units covering counter-terrorism, major crime and undercover operations. “We know how criminals operate, we know how they think and we can counter the threat that they present,” he says.
These criminals are not your common-or-garden opportunists, Hill explains. “The fact is, if you are high net worth (HNW) and you live in a very grand house, the chances of you becoming a victim of a low-level speculative, opportunist, volume criminal is remote.” People who regularly burgle houses for whatever valuables they can find, perhaps to fund a drug addiction, are not going to risk the high walls and security cameras.
The real threat, Hill says, is from international gangs who may only commit a handful of these crimes a year. “If you are of the right calibre, people will travel to the UK to commit crime. That’s how committed and capable these individuals are,” says Hill.
“If you are of the right calibre, people will travel to the UK to commit crime. That’s how committed and capable these individuals are.”
Globalisation and cheap, direct flights have changed the threat landscape. “There was a series of burglaries in a very HNW area. An individual would come over for reconnaissance, identify the properties, go back and send a team over to the UK. Over three or four days they’d burgle the houses, send the valuables in Jiffy bags back to South America, then head back home.”
CCTV can be overcome with face coverings. Security patrol shift patterns can be memorised. Every new piece of technology promising to keep your valuables secure will quickly have a cheap and easily accessible workaround.
“They will look to counter or deal with the measures that are in place,” says Hill. “So, what we advocate for our clients is a security infrastructure that doesn’t rely on a single measure. Everything that we look to put in place for our clients is designed on the basis that the previous measure has failed.” It’s the ‘Swiss cheese model’ of home risk assessments.
Hill will run a wargaming exercise on his clients to probe for vulnerabilities. “We look at their lifestyle, and we approach their security as if we were a sophisticated criminal looking to target them,” says Hill. This requires complete honesty from the client. “If you’ve fallen out with somebody in business, if you’ve ended up upsetting the wrong people, if you’ve had a relationship which has gone wrong, all these may be factors that will influence your security profile.”
“Panic rooms do nothing other than buy you time until the cavalry arrives.”
Are so many celebs being targeted in Bling Ring-style attacks because they post their luxurious lives on Instagram and TikTok? Hill isn’t convinced. “If you’re going to show off your brand new Patek Philippe, they’ll know you’ve got one. But they’re gonna know anyway that footballers love their bling.” Social media is more of a risk factor when a client — or a family member — posts their holiday photos in real-time, confirming to criminals that they’re not at home.
There are some security trends that HNW clients love but Hill doesn’t. A panic room is not always the most secure option, he says. “Panic rooms do nothing other than buy you time until the cavalry arrives,” says Hill. “They tend to create more anxiety than they relieve.” If clients insist on one, he makes them run evacuation drills, gamifying it if they have children to help them get there quickly and quietly without scaring them.
Close protection following you round is also unnecessary a lot of the time, Hill feels. “A very large proportion of those people don’t need it, but they pay for it because they’re fearful,” he explains. Good home security means a robber won’t get close enough to threaten violence in the first place. “We often say to the HNW community, you don’t want a highly trained ex-serviceman to be neutralising a threat on your living room carpet. What you need is a clever bloke who’s not gonna let them through the gate.”
For those of us who don’t have mansions full of expensive watches to worry about, Hill still has some solid home security advice. Keep ground-floor windows closed in summer. Don’t leave ladders or garden tools lying about. In winter when it gets dark early, consider putting lamps on timers to give the impression someone is always in.
“You don’t want a highly trained ex-serviceman to be neutralising a threat on your living room carpet.”
But whatever your net worth, Hill is clear Londoners should not be hugely anxious about burglaries and home invasions. “The fear of crime is almost worse than the crime itself,” he says. “Things that happen in movies are incredibly, incredibly rare,” he says. Don’t believe scary stories online about “somebody going into a house somewhere and holding somebody hostage for a weekend and cutting their fingers off”, basically.
He adds: “If you have a security infrastructure that’s in place, that is properly operated and effectively designed but proportionate to your lifestyle, the chances of you ever being targeted for that kind of crime is almost non-existent.”
