Celeste’s Uber was taking longer than usual to arrive. She guessed the car was stuck behind a level crossing around the corner from her flat in Enfield. It was a sunny morning in May 2024 and Celeste, whose name has been changed, was six months pregnant.
She sat down on the curb to text her sister and personal trainer to say she was on her way, and after a few minutes decided to start walking in the direction the Uber would be coming from. That’s when she saw a group of men wearing balaclavas running towards her.
Before she could get away, one of them grabbed her. Her trainers came off as she kicked and screamed for help. They bundled her into the back of a white van which then drove off at speed. “I was thinking, this can’t be happening,” Celeste recalls. “Still today, it doesn’t feel real.”
As the van hurtled over speed bumps, Celeste remembers telling the men she was pregnant but they didn’t take any notice. One of them said to her if she did not stop crying, he would kick the baby out of her stomach. “I’ll never forget that,” she says.
They went through Celeste’s handbag and took her phone before blindfolding her and putting cable ties around her wrists. Since her first month of pregnancy, Celeste had suffered severe nausea. She vomited on the floor of the van repeatedly.
After half an hour, the van came to a stop and the men asked for her phone password, saying they wanted to ring her partner. It was hours later, when they were threatening to cut off her fingers and making her partner listen to her screams on the phone, that Celeste found out what they were after.
Celeste was an influencer with more than 20,000 followers on Instagram. She regularly posted pictures of her glamorous lifestyle: trips to Dubai, shopping sprees at Chanel and glitzy London events. In her photos she often wore expensive jewellery, including a rose gold watch from Audemars Piguet. “I don’t even know how to say it,” says Celeste of the luxury Swiss watchmaker. “I’ve only recently learned the value of it. I wasn’t even that into watches.” The watch has a resale value of about £60,000 and was a gift from her partner, a successful music manager.
Celeste’s kidnappers were demanding a cash ransom as well as items of jewellery including the watch. She was not wearing it at the time, leading her to believe the men had found her through Instagram. What followed was a nine-hour ordeal that would change her life.
Dripping in diamonds
Most successful influencers flaunt an aspirational lifestyle online, complete with all the trappings of luxury, including designer handbags and expensive jewellery.
“Social media has created demand for these pieces, so they’ve become status symbols,” says Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City University. “And of course with any status symbol it has to be seen, it has to be visible for it to have the desired impact.” This makes it easier than ever for criminals to find potential targets.
Last December, a man broke into the Primrose Hill mansion of socialite influencer Shafira Huang, who is married to a wealthy property developer. The lone thief made off with more than £10 million of diamond jewellery, including rare pieces from De Beers, Chopard and Van Cleef & Arpels. On her Instagram, Huang had posted pictures of herself dripping in diamonds, often on a private jet or abroad. Huang described the items stolen from her as “deeply personal” and called for a stronger police presence.
Until recently, gangs were more likely to orchestrate smash and grabs on luxury stores in areas like New Bond Street. As a result, many shops tightened their security or removed expensive items from window displays.
Predator and prey
Covid changed crime patterns, with thieves pivoting from smash-and-grab raids to targeting the super-rich as they leave restaurants and clubs
“Covid really turned everything upside down, we saw a significant change in crime patterns,” explains Katya Hills, founder of The Watch Register, the world’s largest database of lost and stolen watches. Thieves pivoted from robbing businesses to targeting individuals, and watches became a favourite. Many top-end brands, such as Patek Philippe and Rolex, have years-long waiting lists for their most sought-after designs, meaning watches on the secondary market often sell for up to triple their original price.
The thieves still operate in the same areas — Mayfair, Chelsea and Knightsbridge — but now station themselves outside restaurants, shops and nightclubs frequented by the super rich. “Sexy Fish is a restaurant that comes up time and again with regard to watch theft,” says Hills.
According to a survey by The Watch Register, nearly half of luxury watch owners in the UK feel nervous about wearing one in public for fear of it being stolen. And it’s not just their watches they have to worry about: a Freedom of Information request found one in five watch thefts in London last year involved some form of violence.
See also: High profile luxury crimes such as the mugging of Jenson Button has London's super-elite reeling
Blue Stevens, 24, was stabbed to death in front of his girlfriend outside the Park Tower Hotel and Casino last month. Eyewitnesses said the attacker was trying to steal a Rolex from Stevens’s wrist but he resisted.
City University’s Taylor says that while larger heists are highly organised and conducted by groups who prefer to use coercion over violence, thieves who pounce off the back of a moped or on the street are more likely to be amateur criminals who are much more volatile, with a higher use of violence and often tragic outcomes.
“London is one big toy store for criminals,” says Christopher Marinello, the Sherlock Holmes of the art world who has spent three decades tracking down stolen and looted masterpieces. In recent years, he’s widened his net to luxury goods including watches and jewellery.
Assaulted in front of children
Summer is when watch thefts spike, as wealthy tourists come to the capital to spend money, and hot weather means shorter sleeves and easier targets. Marinello says he receives six or seven requests a week from people who have had their luxury watches stolen in the capital.
London is “right up there with the worst” cities for watch theft, alongside New York, Milan and Paris, according to Marinello. But he has also noticed the attacks in London are increasingly violent — many clients come to him saying that they were assaulted or beaten in front of their children for a watch or luxury handbag. One client’s wrist was cut by a thief on a moped as his arm hung out of his Ferrari on Sloane Square.
The mega-rich are responding in kind. F1 heiress Petra Ecclestone says London is “not the same place it used to be” and she feels much safer in somewhere like Dubai. In 2019 her sister Tamara Ecclestone had £25m worth of jewellery stolen from her 57-room Kensington mansion, in what was considered to be the biggest home burglary in British history.
Meanwhile, billionaire chemicals magnate Sir Jim Ratcliffe has stopped wearing a watch in London after seeing machete-wielding gangs outside Harrods, near his office in Knightsbridge. Singer Ed Sheeran, who owns at least 27 homes in London, described the capital as “sketchy” in a podcast interview last year, adding: “If you wander around with, like, a Louis Vuitton duffel bag and a 200 grand watch, you are going to get robbed.”
Two years ago the Met Police began to crack down on “Rolex Rippers”. Undercover officers from the Flying Squad unit, who tackle violent crime, posed as wealthy members of the public wearing luxury watches in hotspots like Soho in order to bait thieves. They made 40 arrests from 22 covert operations.
But Marinello believes police could do more. He says when clients report a theft, police often respond: “Here’s a crime reference number to give to your insurance company, good luck,” rather than attempting to find the perpetrator. According to a report from Policy Exchange, the number of robberies (defined as theft with the use or threat of force) solved by the Met has steadily fallen since 2022 — last year it was down to 5.1 per cent.
While criminals are turning to social media to find potential victims, they’re also using it as a platform to sell on their loot, with buyers happy to pay in crypto and not ask questions.
Social media companies are doing little to help. Marinello and his team found a Richard Mille watch that was stolen from his client being resold on Instagram by a seller in Hong Kong. The watch is one of just five ever made and worth £3 million. When Marinello contacted Instagram, he received no response.
Luxury watches are engraved with unique serial numbers and can be marked as stolen on The Watch Register’s online database. Jewellery, however, is far less traceable. Distinctive rings and necklaces can be broken up, with gold melted down and gemstones sold off. The price of gold has risen by around 30 per cent in the last year, making jewellery theft a lucrative and appealing crime.
“Jewellery has certainly overtaken watches in the past year,” says Andy Fairbanks, CEO of UK Protection LTD, one of the largest independent security operators in the UK that specifically works with watches and jewellery. Fairbanks tells clients to be vigilant in London, asking: “Would you walk around with £50,000 in £20 notes waving around in your hand?”.
Yet even victims who are careful in real life can be targeted through their social media. Celeste had stopped wearing her jewellery in London after an influencer friend was attacked by watch thieves in Marylebone, yet her kidnappers were convinced of her wealth.
“They said, ‘Oh, we know your partner’s got loads of money.’ And I was like, ‘It’s not as much as you probably think’.” While her life may have seemed glamorous, the reality was relatively normal — she lived in a social housing flat with her son, who was 15 at the time.
Celeste’s ordeal ended only when something spooked the men holding her and they all fled. “My first thought was, I just need to get home, because my son's going to be panicking thinking, where's his mum?”. She opened the van door and “just jumped out and started running”, before finding a taxi which took her home.
The Met used forensic evidence to catch three of the men involved. This month they were sentenced to between five and nine years in prison. One, Audi Johnson, had a previous conviction for robbing a family at gunpoint on Christmas Day 2009.
Since May last year, Celeste has been “living out of a black bag” between her mother and sister’s homes. Both Celeste and the police have asked Enfield Council to rehouse her, but no progress has been made. At one point she was offered a home in the borough of Newham, which would have meant an hour-long journey to school for her son.
“It’s been the worst 15 months of my whole life,” she says. She “shut down” for a long period and her relationship broke down. “I was a very confident outgoing person, now I’m always in black, always in sunglasses, looking over my shoulder.” Many of her friends have not met her baby daughter,
“I don’t think I could ever go back to that work,” she says of being an influencer. “It’s so sad because I really enjoyed my life. I used to be invited to everything.” Her social media accounts are now private and she often changes her phone number. Celeste knew the luxury lifestyle she promoted helped to bring engagement, now she realises something else: “It also brings danger.”
