When David Webb walks to his office at security firm Valkyrie in Belgravia, one of the most exclusive areas of central London, he doesn’t notice the fine garden squares, elegant white Italian-style stucco terraces, embassies or diplomatic residences.
His eyes are drawn to windows: are they made of toughened glass? Front doors: are they reinforced with a triple-point locking system? He assesses the ‘outside furniture’: drainpipes, ledges, crevices. ‘Could I climb onto the roof?’ he thinks.
Then, his eye goes to the name plates outside apartment buildings. Flat one: Jones; Flat two: Smith; and so on. It isn’t true to say that everyone puts their name on the door these days, but plenty still do, he says. Crazy.
His colleague Matthew Newton is similarly critical of the oversights of homeowners. ‘When it’s dark, people leave their curtains open,’ he says. ‘You can look straight into the front room. It’s all lit up. You can see everything. Draw your curtains.’
But Matthew’s biggest concern is not physical. ‘We’re not always aware of how much personal information we’re giving away and how accessible it actually is,’ he says.
Not just on social media. But to the whole digital world.
Take the electoral register. Unless you opt out of the open register, your full name and address is available to anyone who wants to buy a copy.
Then, there is the rise in wearable tech and health apps which collect intimate details about our daily lives.
Actress Michelle Keegan and her husband Mark Wright’s £3.5million mansion in Essex was burgled last month by a masked gang
Their home features a bar, cinema room, sauna, gym and five-a-side football pitch
‘It’s not understanding how that information can be used against you,’ he says.
Even more sinister is the growing use of smart home devices: security cameras, televisions, even fridges, which connect to the internet, and can be hacked and turned into spyware to get invaluable information about the household and their daily routines.
It’s never been easier to invade your home, says Matthew, ‘and it’s not just someone coming in through a door or a window. They can get into it without ever physically being there’.
Judging from recent news reports, burglaries of the super rich seem to be on the rise.
Last month, a heavily pregnant actress Michelle Keegan and TV celebrity husband Mark Wright were subjected to a terrifying burglary by a masked gang at their £3.5million mansion in Essex.
Mark and Michelle, who gave birth to a baby girl last week, bought the house, which features a bar, cinema room, sauna, gym and five-a-side football pitch, in 2019 and regularly share updates on their renovations on a dedicated Instagram account, WrightyHome, which has almost 700,000 followers.
Police were alerted to the break-in via the couple’s security system and detectives reportedly believe the raiders were professionals ‘looking for a big score’ on the magnificent five-bedroom mansion.
Meanwhile, the recent heist on art collector and influencer Shafira Huang’s home in Primrose Hill, North London, was huge even by big-burglary standards: the thief stole £10.4million of luxury jewellery and handbags.
Model and socialite Tamara Ecclestone’s mansion in Kensington was raided in 2019
Some £25million worth of jewellery, cash and precious stones was stolen from the property
Arsenal footballer Raheem Sterling suffered a burglary at his home in Surrey while representing England at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar
But not as big as the £25million of jewellery, cash and precious stones stolen from model and socialite Tamara Ecclestone’s mansion in Kensington in 2019.
Jack Grealish, Raheem Sterling, Paul Pogba and Frank Lampard are among a list of at least 80 top football players, including three managers, to have had their homes raided since the mid-2000s, according to analysis by online magazine Vice.
The Beckhams have reportedly upped the security in their Cotswolds home, after their West London house was broken into while they were there in March 2022.
Darren February, the thief who stole £1million of jewellery from Simon Cowell’s £10 million home, while he and his family slept, in Holland Park, West London, had 37 previous convictions for burglary.
February often targeted the ‘rich pickings’ in the wealthy areas of Kensington and Bayswater, the court heard during his trial in 2017. He was jailed for eight years.
What’s clear, says Matthew Newton, is the high-profile burglaries we read about are only the tip of the iceberg. Many of the rich and famous who fall victim to break-ins keep quiet about what happened.
‘The problem is much bigger than we think,’ he says.
Valkyrie, the security investigation firm he and David work for, provides physical protection and other security services for wealthy clients and businesses.
Burglars, who targeted football players’ properties, were caught by CCTV on the roof of a property in Cheshire
Vincent Ball was jailed in 2020 for his part in the spree of burglaries
In Norse mythology, the Valkyries were a group of female warriors on horseback. But the office, situated on the upper floor of an elegant building in Belgrave Square, feels like an exclusive gentleman’s club: rich upholstery; leather chairs; men from military and civilian intelligence backgrounds.
David Webb, the managing director, served in the UK special forces for 16 years before joining a global corporate security company. Matthew is a cyber threats and investigations expert for ultra high net-worth individuals. It is a world of acronyms: Osint (Open Source Intelligence); Humanint (Human Intelligence); Socmedint (Social Media Intelligence).
I am shown into a meeting room which is secured with a passcode to prevent unauthorised access. There’s a large, round oak table, bookcases and glass cabinets which hold a display of bugging equipment: car trackers, a coke bottle with a hidden camera, a plug adapter with a sound recording device inside.
‘Not that long ago you had to go to a spy shop in Piccadilly to buy a hidden camera, now you can get it off Amazon and it’s delivered the next day,’ says David.
But what has spyware and eavesdropping devices got to do with burglaries? I ask. ‘To gain information,’ Matthew says.
They talk of a case where criminals found a parking ticket in a recycling bin which linked to a high-end car parked in the street.
‘OK, the criminal thinks, let’s put a tracker on the vehicle and find out where it’s going,’ says David. ‘From that, he’ll get an idea of the ins and outs of the household. Then he’ll start mapping security. Has it got a CCTV, an alarm, other security features? Ultimately work out whether this place is worth targeting.’
In another case a home was burgled after it was sold to new owners. ‘They sold it with the CCTV and various individuals associated with the previous owners ended up in control of those CCTV cameras,’ says David.
John Barlow, of Liverpool, was also sent down after Cheshire Police caught three members of the gang
Thomas Mee was sentenced for conspiracy to burgle at Cheshire Crown Court
Protecting your home can cost anything from £10,000 for a general security upgrade to £500,000 year for ‘embassy-level’ security, which includes 24-hour close protection bodyguards, additional guards sitting outside your house, someone to monitor CCTV and a ‘reaction capability’ – a team to respond quickly to an incident.
Police were alerted to the raid on Mark Wright and Michelle Keegan’s home via a state-of-the-art security system.
‘Because, do you just want a recording of someone burgling your house which you watch at a later date? Or do you want to do something about it as it’s happening?’ says David.
Valkyrie is now installing a safe room – a fortified space where people can go to protect themselves if they feel in danger – in the bathroom of a private residence at a cost more than £50,000.
The company has been involved in 34 ‘security related’ matters in the past year, around a third of which were burglaries or worries about a burglary; a 29 per cent increase in five years.
The burglaries tend to be ‘gang-related’, Matthew says, street gangs or organised criminals who invest time and resources in researching their victim.
‘What they teach themselves, especially on the tech side, is extraordinary,’ says David.
‘Some may be from a military background,’ explains Jeff Hill, head of Protects, the protection arm of The Private Office, an elite property service, based in Guildford, Surrey.
‘The discipline, fitness, team ethic, organisational skills, logistics – they are very professional. We’re not talking about a £10-a-bag heroin addict.’
Hill, 6ft 6in tall and a former police detective and assistant chief constable, has teamed up with a covert policing expert. They say they know how criminals work and use that as part of the solution.
‘The key is never to rely on just one security measure. You need layers. Physical and technical security. Criminals are not easily put off,’ he says. ‘Not at this level. They are flexible and innovative.’
‘It is a cat and mouse game,’ agrees David. ‘You’re always playing catch-up. They up their game; we up ours.’
So, what’s behind the rise? Simply, social media. The biggest source of information about celebrities are themselves.
Following the break-in of Wright and Keegan’s house in February, ex-Met detective chief inspector Mick Neville said the couple could have been preyed on due to their home Instagram page, which details how they created their ‘dream home’.
‘The vast majority of people will look at an Instagram page for the right reasons,’ he said. ‘But if you are going to put your home in the spotlight then there will be wicked people who try to take advantage of that. They will analyse images of the property to look for weaknesses in security and utilise that for their own nefarious purposes.’
Tamara Ecclestone posted a holiday picture of her five-year-old daughter boarding a private jet for Lapland on Instagram hours before the jewellery raid on her home.
Kim Kardashian, who has 151 million followers on Instagram, has said that she no longer posts ‘in real time’ after being robbed at gunpoint at a rented mansion in Paris in 2016. She was tied up while robbers stole jewellery worth up to £8.5million.
‘People really knew my every move,’ she said. ‘They knew what I had, they knew where I was, what I was doing.’
It was easy to predict that Raheem Sterling, the now Arsenal star, wasn’t going to be at home in his Surrey mansion in December 2022, because he was playing for England at the World Cup in Qatar. The haul included ten of Sterling’s Rolex watches.
But even unknown figures are at risk, warns Matthew.
‘Hedge fund managers say: “It won’t happen to me. I’m not high profile.” And yet they’re named on rich lists with their net worth. The question of where they live can be pieced together from other sources. For example, Companies House, the public register of businesses.
‘People often use their home address, especially if they’re a small business and are just starting up.’
You might think you’re giving nothing away by posting a picture taken outside your home, but that image can be ‘reverse engineered’ by ready-made software and AI to work out the location.
One security firm I spoke to was able to identify a property from floor tiles alone.
‘Within a few hours we were able to find the estate agent the property had been sold through and, of course, when estate agents are selling properties, what’s on there? Pictures of the house and floor plans.’
Furthermore, ‘there is increasing use of violence in attacks,’ says David. ‘It used to be rare for burglars. Now they’re so brazen. Many don’t care about being caught on CCTV. They think, I’ve got a baseball cap on, a balaclava and a black jacket – that could be anyone.’
They know the failings of the police and judicial system.
‘With police forces stretched thin, property-related offences often take a back seat. This means that sophisticated burglary gangs can operate with a sense of impunity, knowing that response times are slow and prosecution rates low,’ adds Matthew.
Detectives have still not caught anybody for the £1million raid on Jack Grealish’s family home in Cheshire, on Boxing Day 2023. They suspect a ‘burglary tourist’ gang from Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru could be responsible, likely to have flown into Britain especially for the raid and may have also returned to South America already.
‘We’ve seen an increase in people turning to private firms rather than the police,’ says Matthew. Cheshire company Stopfordian, for instance, focuses on the footballer heartland of Alderley Edge. It claims that, with its 20-man response team, someone will arrive on the scene in an average of four minutes.
Ultimately, however, you can have the best security systems in the world, and there will always be one element that will let you down: humans. Simon Cowell’s security guard was in the loo when the burglar broke in to his home in 2015.
‘Security personnel can be a very effective measure, but humans like every other measure can fail – they can get distracted and can’t be everywhere at once,’ says Jeff Hill.
Likewise, staff can be fallible or corruptible. Police suspect the raid on Grealish’s mansion may have been an inside job; workmen had recently been in the property.
Housekeepers, drivers and nannies can be bribed. You may think you have trustworthy staff. But CVs and references can be faked. ‘You can’t truly vet someone 100 per cent in the digital world,’ says Matthew.
There are some unobtrusive design measures you can incorporate into properties to make them safer, adds Jeff. For example, ‘hostile planting’: spiky garden plants such as eryngium or sea holly, aloe and yukkas.
‘Criminals don’t want to leave a piece of their clothing or their DNA on a spiky plant.’
‘We can’t stop criminals doing the crime,’ adds Jeff. ‘What we try to do is make it so difficult they go elsewhere.’
