Why Walgreens Locked Up the Spam: Inside the $500 Billion Shoplifting Economy

The Rise of the Organized Booster Economy

The plastic fortress has arrived. From toothpaste at Duane Reade to power tools at Home Depot, American shoppers increasingly find everyday essentials locked behind plexiglass, summoning an employee for a can of Spam or a box of hair dye. The catalyst is not a temporary crime wave but the industrialization of shoplifting, a shift from desperate individuals to structured criminal networks that clean out shelves in 60 seconds and funnel goods through legitimate online storefronts.

At the center of this economy in New York City was Roni Rubinov, owner of New Liberty Loans pawnshop. His business model was simple: a legion of boosters—often people struggling with addiction—would sweep cosmetics and designer goods from chains like CVS and Duane Reade, selling them to Rubinov for pennies on the dollar. His staff would remove anti-theft tags and list the products on an eBay storefront, Treasure-Deals-USA, at a steep discount. When a product sold well, he ordered his boosters to steal more.

The scale is staggering. The National Retail Federation estimates that organized retail crime accounts for nearly half of all inventory loss. Target’s CFO projected $600 million in profit erosion from theft in a single year, and Rite Aid executives are openly weighing the nuclear option of putting every single product behind a showcase. The response is not just about security guards; it is a high-tech arms race involving forensic labs, blockchain tags, and surveillance vans.

The human cost is woven through this supply chain. For boosters like Jerard Iamunno, who stole to support a heroin habit after his wife’s death, the predatory payouts from fences fueled a constant cycle of desperation. Meanwhile, retail employees report a psychological toll, facing threats from knives and scissors as they are asked to enforce soft policies. The locked case isn't just an inconvenience; it’s a visible scar on a deeply broken retail ecosystem.

How E-Fencing Has Industrialized Shoplifting

The Amazon Effect: The World’s Largest Unregulated Pawnshop

The single greatest force behind modern shoplifting is the digital storefront. Online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace have become the world’s most efficient fences, providing anonymous, scalable channels to sell stolen goods. As one law enforcement official noted, Amazon may function as the largest unregulated pawnshop on the planet. The economics are too good to ignore: a fence can buy a $1,200 pair of Cartier glasses from a booster for roughly $100, then sell them online for $600, a clean profit that bypasses traditional pawnshop oversight.

This digital layer transformed what was once a local nuisance into a national logistics problem. The case of Steve Skarritt, a Texas housepainter who allegedly fenced $5 million in stolen power tools in two years, illustrates the scale. He used an Amazon storefront called “Painting SBS” to sell drills ripped from Home Depot stores hundreds of miles away, literally moving inventory between floors of his home with a freight elevator. The ability to aggregate stolen goods from a dispersed network of thieves and sell them to unsuspecting online bargain hunters has made fencing a high-volume, low-risk business.

In response, new federal legislation buried in the $1.7 trillion spending bill will soon require online platforms to verify the identities of high-volume sellers. The law targets the exact archetype of accounts that made Rubinov and Skarritt successful: third-party sellers pushing large quantities of new, in-demand goods with no transparent supply chain. However, enforcement and verification at scale remain daunting challenges for platforms that have historically prioritized transaction volume over audit rigor.

The Tragic Economics of a Booster

Behind the macroeconomic numbers is a brutal economic reality for the lowest level of the supply chain: the booster. Jerard Iamunno, a long-time thief for Rubinov’s network, described a math of desperation. A booster would risk arrest to steal $500 worth of cosmetics and receive just 7 to 10 percent of the retail value—perhaps $40. That is typically just enough for a day’s fix, a margin so tight it guarantees the booster must steal again immediately to stave off withdrawal. The fences, exploiting addiction, impose a poverty trap that maximizes theft frequency while minimizing their own operating costs.

This structural inequity is why petty theft is so difficult to deter. Increasing a felony charge from a $50 theft to a $200 theft does not disrupt a closed loop where the fence sets the wage at subsistence level. The system is efficient because it externalizes all risk—criminal and physical—onto the person stealing the goods while the digital middlemen and the consumer who clicks “buy” face virtually no scrutiny. Iamunno’s story is not an outlier; it is a key driver of the volume required to keep the e-fencing engine running.

Beyond the Plexiglass: Who Profits and Who Pays

The most uncomfortable truth is the broad participation in this shadow economy. The same consumer who feels humiliated asking for a locked-up deodorant may be an unwitting buyer of stolen goods from a third-party seller. The system creates a bizarre win-lose-lose-win matrix: the booster loses their freedom and health; the fence wins a huge margin; the retailer loses inventory and invests heavily in loss prevention; and the consumer wins a steep discount on a secondary market they assume is legitimate. Major retailers are not passive victims; their decades-long shift to self-checkout and reduced floor staff to cut labor costs inadvertently created the theft-friendly environment that now forces them to lock up entire aisles, frustrating their own customers.

Reversing the Lock-Up: A Roadmap for Retailers

The path out of the plexiglass era requires coordinated action from retailers, platforms, and consumers, not just more locks. Here are the specific steps stakeholders can take, grounded in the trends driving this crisis:

• Invest in Supply Chain Transparency Over Cages: Retailers like Lowe’s are already piloting RFID tags and blockchain-based records to track legitimate sales. Widening this practice across high-theft categories (cosmetics, tools) creates digital receipts that make stolen goods unsellable on legitimate platforms. The goal is to make e-fencing technically difficult, not just physically harder.
• Enforce the INFORM Consumers Act Aggressively: The new federal law requiring online marketplaces to verify sellers with $5,000 in annual sales is a direct hit on operations like Rubinov’s Treasure-Deals-USA. Retailers and brands should partner with platforms to flag suspicious storefronts selling large volumes of new, unbranded or deeply discounted items, using the impending regulatory requirements as enforcement leverage.
• Target the Financial Infrastructure: Law enforcement built cases against Linda Been and Steve Skarritt by following the money—bank records and transaction fees. Major retailers should pool loss-prevention data with financial crime units to trace the payments flowing to high-volume fences, making the banking of illicit proceeds as risky as the stealing itself.
• Consumer Due Diligence: A $1,200 pair of Cartier glasses sold online for $400 by an unverified seller is likely stolen. Consumers shopping on third-party marketplaces should view prices below 50% of retail with extreme skepticism, checking seller history and whether the same seller lists improbable quantities of new-without-tags goods across unrelated categories.