With shoplifting on the rise — including organized teams sweeping through stores and lifting scores of items in minutes — retailers are beefing up plainclothes patrols and video surveillance, and competitors are working together to prevent crime.

Stores are running online stings and sending safety measure guards onto sales floors posing as customers. The FBI helped create a database for trading notes on suspects and their methods. Minneapolis-based Target Corp. even has a forensic lab and tracks video feed from its 1,700 stores at regional hubs.

“In light of today’s economy and the expense pressure, it is an investment that shows good return,” said Brad Brekke, a former FBI special agent who heads assets protection for Target. “There is definitely economic pressure generating more activity across the board — hoax, theft, cyber crime. The intensity has gone up as the economy has gone down.”

The National Retail Federation, a trade group, says nearly half of 115 retailers it surveyed are spending more on crime-fighting — some companies spend more than $1 million a year just on personnel hired to stop crime rings. The NRF, which opens a loss prevention conference Monday in Los Angeles, says 92 percent of the surveyed retailers were victims of organized theft teams last year, an 8 percent increase, even as many saw slumping sales.

More individuals are shoplifting, as in several steak-stealing incidents in Kroger Co. grocery stores across the country that year. But retailers say the huge majority of their losses are from thefts by organized rings that usually send in a small group including a getaway driver, an in-store lookout and several “shoppers.”

Joe LaRocca, a senior adviser for the retail federation, said it only makes sense to cooperate with competitors to fight the problem, which officials peg at $35 billion a year and rising.

“You know you’re getting hit…

[Source] dhiram