Is this London's most prolific shoplifter? Romanian mum of three, 20, who police say stole £300,000 of Boots cosmetics by hiding them in the secret pockets of her voluminous skirt

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Were there a Guinness Book of Records entry for shoplifting, then surely Bianca Mirica would be in it.
How much do you think she stole from branches of Boots across London – always Boots, always perfumes and cosmetics – in just six months between December 2023 and May last year?
Answer: £120,000. At least that's what Mirica, 20, a Romanian mother of three, admitted to after she was finally caught, Southwark Crown Court heard this week.
But Boots suspect the real figure, police sources told us, was a staggering £300,000 (£299,000 to be exact).
You can buy a detached house in some parts of the country for less.
One of the 30 thieving expeditions she was convicted of epitomised her modus operandi. The date was March 7, 2024, when she entered Boots in Hornchurch, East London, with a long, flowing skirt with hidden pockets, a 'spotter' to look out for – and distract – security guards, and her own key to open locked cabinets containing the most expensive brands – Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, for example.
Value of items stolen: £16,867. Which must be something of a record in itself for the sheer number of beauty products stripped from a single store in one go.
But the Hornchurch branch was not her only target. On her way there, she stopped off in Camden, not far from her home in neighbouring Haringey, where she helped herself to make-up and toiletries worth £7,729.93.
March 7 was one of five separate occasions during her frenzied crime spree when multiple Boots outlets were hit on the same day. But there is a much bigger story behind Mirica, just one person, remember, working for one Romanian gang, operating in one city.
The field is infinitely more crowded, with gangs, mostly run by Romanian organised crime networks, using women to plunder shelves on the High Street.
They are part of a shoplifting epidemic which cost the retail industry £2.2billion in 2023 and 2024, an all-time record that equates to more than 55,000 incidents per day.
Shocking but not surprising in the circumstances, because under-resourced police forces – the Met alone is set to lose 1,700 staff to help offset a multi-million budget shortfall in the coming year – are unable or unwilling to respond to such incidents.
And in outlets up and down the country, it is standard practice for staff not to intervene either, for safety reasons, which means shoplifting has been effectively decriminalised in all but name.
Hence the proliferation of serial perpetrators like Mirica. In her 'busiest' month, May last year, she turned up at 11 Boots outlets including the following: May 15, The Strand, (£335.95 of goods stolen); May 19, Haringey (£3,200); May 22, Kilburn (£691.33): May 24, Baker Street (£627.93); May 25, Islington High Street (£2,000); May 29, Regent Street (£4,386).
Many native Romanians arrived in the UK after 2014 when restrictions on their right to work – following the country's admission to the EU in 2007 – were lifted.
The vast majority contribute to the economy, working in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture and healthcare where it is sometimes hard to recruit British staff.
Mirica, who came here around five years ago, was not one of them. She is from a Roma community in Valcea County, a region situated around 100 miles north-west of the capital Bucharest, where she was twice caught shoplifting – 'attempted aggravated theft' is the legal terminology in Romania – on a visit back to the country in 2023, our inquiries have established.
Romanian law allows the prosecution of offences punishable by up to seven years in jail to be waived if the cost of proceeding to trial exceeds the gravity of the wrongdoing.
The upshot was that Mirica, who is believed to have incurred a fine, was allowed to return to the UK to begin, or at least continue, her crime spree against Boots.
The Roma have, rightly or wrongly, been linked to widespread criminality. And the issue of early marriage and early motherhood is an indisputable reality of life for Roma women, with 46 per cent marrying before the age of 18, the European Parliament was told in May, and one in three becoming pregnant in adolescence.
Mirica herself is a product of that culture. The only reason she moved, or was perhaps sent, to the UK, it seems, was for the sole purpose of committing crime – and her children, if history tells us anything, would have been groomed to follow in her footsteps. Examples, after all, of Romanian kids being dispatched to rob and steal are not hard to find.
Indeed, the annual crime survey by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) highlighted the 'grooming of underage children to undertake theft'.
Mirica's oldest child is three, which means she was pregnant for the first time when she was 16. Her second is aged 18 months.
Their welfare was the subject of 'intervention, by police and children's social services', a pre-sentence report revealed, after concerns were expressed about their living conditions and Mirica's associations with organised crime. Both are now being cared for by friends and relatives in Romania.
Her third child? Mirica appeared with her baby – born on June 20 – in a video-link from HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, where she was held on remand (in the mother and baby unit) before being jailed for 32 months, a prison term reflecting the fact that the judge had little sympathy with her, kids or no kids.
Her criminal career provides a glimpse into the burden individuals like Mirica place on overstretched social services, the welfare system – and ultimately on taxpayers.
Mirica claimed, through an interpreter, that the things she stole were for personal use – yes, the entire haul, enough to open her own shop. However, the carefully planned raids, including having a key to open cabinets ('universal' keys are available on the internet) pointed to a very different version of events.
In fact, Mirica is understood to have operated with around four or five other girls, one of whom is just 16, according to court documents obtained by the Mail.
She has three previous convictions, including one for stealing meat and dairy products from Sainsbury's.
These resulted in several referral orders, which supposedly involved a programme of activities to address her offending behaviour, as well as a sentence of 16 weeks' detention, suspended for 12 months with a requirement to complete 80 hours of unpaid work.
She finished only 40 and was sent nine enforcement letters for 'unacceptable absences'.
Her attitude is confirmation, if any were needed, that soft-touch sentencing is failing.
'Your expressions of remorse should be treated with caution and may not be considered sincere,' the judge told her. 'I do not doubt you are sorry you are now in custody. But I very much doubt you are sorry you committed these offences.'
Unsurprisingly, back in Haringey, where Mirica lived in a rented mid-terraced household of ever-changing men and women, just a short walk from Tottenham Hotspur football stadium, she is not remembered fondly.
'Mirica walked around with such arrogance in designer gear,' said neighbour James Mulqueen, 53. 'I am sure she was stealing it all.'
Expensive brands, including £300 Dsquared2 jeans, could be regularly seen hanging out of a top floor bedroom window.
Police were often called to the property, along with the council, because of anti-social behaviour, 'shouting and screaming' at all hours and children running amok.
Up to six women were staying in the house at one time.
'Different men would arrive in flash cars, day and night,' Mr Mulqueen said. 'They were a nightmare to live next to. They had no respect for anything or anyone.'
Another resident, a pensioner added: 'They were horrible, especially her. They used to shout abuse if I asked them to be quiet.'
The circumstances surrounding Mirica's arrest are unclear.
However, CCTV from stores around the country, especially where organised crime is suspected of being involved in shoplifting, is fed into an intelligence-sharing central hub at the National Business Crime Centre (NBCC), based within the City of London Police, where facial recognition software is used to identify offenders.
'The majority of the organised crime gangs involved in shoplifting are Romanians,' said David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in the Met, who co-founded My Local Bobby, a respected private security firm which provides cover for a number of stores, as well as 24-hour patrols in residential neighbourhoods in London and Essex.
'There is only one reason they come here – to commit crime. They see the UK as rich pickings.'
Sister company TM Eye, effectively a civilian CID made up of highly experienced retired detectives like Mr McKelvey, mount private prosecutions against shoplifters apprehended by My Local Bobby guards, who wear red caps and vests.
The organisation has undertaken 1,200 such cases over the past 15 years. Most are against individuals – for example, drug addicts – but around 10 per cent have been against gangs, nearly all Romanian.
'They operate in the same way,' says Mr McKelvey. 'A man in an expensive vehicle like a Range Rover drops off the team, usually women, who target a particular area, before picking them up at the end of the day and moving on to the next area.'
There are no end of examples. In August last year, three women were jailed for a £40,000 crime spree targeting make-up and beauty counters in East Anglia.
A few months earlier, a Romanian shoplifting ring operating in York, including two women, were given prison sentences for stealing £1,282 of fragrances from Browns department store.
Beauty products are coveted because of their small size, high value and the ease with which they can be resold.
'Retail crime is spiralling out of control,' said Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the BRC. 'Every day, criminals are getting bolder and more aggressive.'
Satisfaction with the police is low, with 61 per cent of respondents who took part in the BRC's annual crime survey describing their response as 'poor' or 'very poor'.
The largely untold story of the shoplifting epidemic, though, is that it is pushing up the price of everyday items.
'We are all paying for it, that's the point,' said Mr McKelvey. 'The retailers are still making big profits because they work out what their bottom line losses are due to shoplifting – 'shrinkage' they call it – and increase prices.'
So, Bianca Mirica is effectively stealing from everyone.