A 2026 Guide to Combatting Organized Retail Crime

2026 is proving to be a rough year for retailers. Global instability has produced negative downstream effects like higher oil prices and spiking inflation, forcing the average consumer to work harder to purchase the goods they need as access to some goods drops and costs rise.

On top of that, organized retail crime (ORC) has been responsible for billions of dollars in shrink and lost revenue and discouraged some consumers from visiting retail locations altogether.

Relatively higher rates of organized retail crime and overall external theft in the last several years have driven many retailers to reevaluate their approaches to resilience in areas like physical security, risk assessment, incident response and crisis management to protect their personnel, assets and brand reputations.

To help your retail operation curb the effects of ORC activity, check out this guide to combatting organized retail crime in 2026, including common-sense best practices and the latest innovations in retail security to help you streamline your approach.

What is organized retail crime?

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), organized retail crime is defined as “the systematic large-scale theft of retail goods from manufacturers, logistics and transportation providers, distributors or retailers and the subsequent resale of stolen goods for financial gain to wholesalers, retailers or individual consumers, typically for a fraction of the retail cost.”

Organized retail crime is distinct from shoplifting, which denotes individual incidents of small-scale retail property theft, likely for personal use. Although, when evaluated against the criminal code, both shoplifting and organized retail crime are considered acts of larceny, a type of property crime.

How damaging is organized retail crime for retailers?

The 2023 Retail Security Survey found that retailers lost an estimated $112.1 billion in revenue due to shrink in 2022. An average of 36% of those losses, or $40.4 billion, was attributable to external theft, primarily driven by organized retail crime.

Using a combination of this data and data taken from the U.S. Census Bureau, Capital One Shopping estimated the retail revenue lost to external theft in 2025 at $47.8 billion, and projected this figure to climb to as high as $55.4 billion by 2028.

These projections sync with the findings in the 2025 Impact of Retail Theft & Violence Report, a co-production of the NRF and Loss Prevention Research Council. In this report, retailers indicated that they continue to worry about the impact of ORC on their ability to operate, and that ORC groups have expanded their methods for perpetrating theft and fraud across both physical and digital retail environments. Organized retail crime emerged as the number-one priority related to external theft.

Respondents were also asked which methods of theft performed by organized retail theft groups they had observed as increasing within the prior 12 months. The top six responses were:

• Phone scams/frauds: 70%
• Digital/ecommerce fraud: 55%
• Shoplifting/retail merchandise theft: 52%
• Cargo/supply chain theft: 50%
• Delivery theft: 48%
• Gift card fraud and theft: 41%

In other words, as retail revenue losses from external theft are projected to rise, retailers have observed more cyber-enabled theft and fraud perpetrated by ORC groups. This is especially worrying as many retailers simply aren’t as informed about how to address theft and fraud in digital spaces, where no amount of traditional physical security improvements can fully protect retail customers.

This shift toward digital theft and fraud by organized retail crime groups coincides with another trend observed by retailers — the rise of ORC groups affiliated with larger transnational organizations. According to the 2025 report, 67% of survey respondents “recorded the involvement of a transnational organized theft group in thefts against their organization.”

As more ORC activity is perpetrated by organizations operating at a transnational scale, two points come into focus:

1. Criminal band collaboration: More organized retail crime perpetrators aren’t independent groups, but rather are arms of highly structured syndicates that pool their resources to carry out more defined large-scale theft strategies.
2. The difficulty of prosecution: Pursuing such organizations through legal means has more jurisdictional entanglements than previously anticipated.

The regulatory landscape for organized retail crime

As retailers saw upticks in organized retail crime activity, they also noticed spikes in the levels of violence and aggression accompanying these crimes. In the 2023 Retail Security Survey, 81% of respondents claimed that ORC groups had become more violent during 2021, and 67% claimed to have experienced even more aggression and violence on top of that in 2022.

To help retailers boost their overall resilience and ensure workers received increasingly necessary training and appropriate accommodations, governing bodies in multiple jurisdictions passed new regulations that required retailers to create or improve retail workplace violence programs, including preparedness trainings, incident response protocols and de-escalation techniques, and protect workers’ rights.

• New York: State Assembly Bill A8947C — also known as the Retail Worker Safety Act — established that all retail industry employers must adopt a workplace violence prevention policy, including training for employees, lists of emergency exits and emergency meeting locations and panic buttons that contact local public safety officers or emergency services.
• California: Assembly Bill 2499 changed state law to create a number of new employee workplace protections. Employers can no longer legally discharge or discriminate against employees who take time off if they or a family member are a victim of an act of workplace violence, among other qualifying conditions. Additionally, employers must also provide “reasonable accommodations” for employees who request accommodations due to an act of workplace violence, to help ensure employee safety.

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2025

As retailers updated their protocols to meet this new regulatory burden, they also began to work with lawmakers to introduce legislation designed to limit or remove what they perceive as investigative and prosecutorial roadblocks for organized retail crimes.

Some of the issues retailers had identified as investigative and prosecutorial barriers were the subject of questioning in the 2025 Impact of Retail Theft & Violence Report. Participating retailers were asked to identify any and all items that they felt negatively impacted the ability of law enforcement agencies and criminal attorneys to investigate or prosecute organized retail crime activities. Answers selected by survey respondents included:

• Limited law enforcement resources: 57%
• Lack of prosecutors’ willingness to prosecute higher levels of crimes: 43%
• Felony threshold laws: 36%
• Lack of aggregating theft incidents to prosecute: 32%
• Lack of multiagency intelligence and coordination: 32%
• Cross-jurisdictional thefts: 30%
• Transnational components of theft groups: 25%
• Inability to gain federal law enforcement support: 23%

To address these issues, retailers began to mount campaigns, working with legislators to draft new laws that would lower investigative, prosecutorial and jurisdictional barriers. One such bill in the U.S. Congress is House Resolution 2853 — also called the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2025, or CORCA — which was introduced in April of 2025.

As of publication, the current text of CORCA will:

• Expand the meaning of certain terms in the federal criminal code, such as “organized retail and supply chain crime” to include numerous additional types of activity.
• Broaden the scope of criminal conduct that qualifies as offenses.
• Make certain offenses applicable for prosecution under the federal money laundering statute.
• Authorize the criminal forfeiture of any property obtained as proceeds of an offense.
• Establish a hub within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate federal law enforcement activities pertaining to organized retail and supply chain crime.

Best practices to protect your retail operation from organized retail crime

While lawmakers work to update relevant statutes and meet the legislative needs of today’s retail environments for organized retail crime, retailers can also implement tried-and-true best practices to help bolster their resilience postures and protect their assets.

• Establish anti-violence, anti-harassment and anti-bullying policies: Organized retail crime can quickly escalate into an act of workplace violence. But the ability of your employees to feel safe at work begins within the confines of your organization. Policies should be zero-tolerance and clearly define unacceptable behaviors for work sites.
• Communicate policies to all employees, managers and supervisors: Every employee must be made aware of workplace violence prevention policies and held to the same standard. Include policies in any employee handbook or other documentation that outlines both employee and employer obligations and expectations.
• Hold regular employee trainings: Trainings should include the content of your policies, signs of potential organized retail theft and violent behavior and workplace violence de-escalation techniques. Run drills so employees know how to react should an incident occur, such as how to quickly initiate incident triage, contact emergency services if needed and send status checks. Establish relations with local police, and involve them in trainings to help your workforce develop a stronger relationship with them.
• Perform regular risk assessment at all work sites: No organized retail crime prevention plan is foolproof, and work site environments change over time. Regular assessments will help your organization identify new security gaps and make adjustments before they create an opening for an incident to occur. Keep your employees involved in the review process to gain key insights that only on-the-ground workers can supply.
• Audit your retail locations’ infrastructure: Test all operational and digital systems to ensure that all procedural and technology solutions are in full working order. Every element of your store’s operation is both relevant and consequential to its security.
• Improve physical security at all work sites: Deliver security improvements at physical work sites where possible, including devices that let employees expedite contact with emergency services, additional security personnel, lighting, surveillance or monitoring, security enhancements for entry points (e.g. keycard access) or those that address any other gaps. Consider revising staffing policies to help keep employees safe during work hours, or amending hours of operation to less dangerous times of day.
• Comply with all workplace violence prevention regulations: Make sure that you meet all legal standards for duty of care and mandatory workplace violence prevention programs as outlined in federal, state or local laws. Pay special attention to those that apply to retailers. Applicable regulations may differ by the size of your company or location of your retail space, but the burden of compliance is yours to meet.

Elements of a unified resilience ecosystem built for organized retail crime

In years past, constructing a security system for a retail location involved weaving together an impromptu combination of different devices and solutions from a range of manufacturers and providers. While each device or solution offered its own benefits, they were disparate and disconnected, each with its own software, login, digital point of entry (if any) and workspace, and none of which could inform the others unless a user did so manually.

But in 2026, while each retail security solution and device continues to deliver unique benefits, they all have a much higher degree of interoperability. As such, they aren’t disparate elements cobbled together in an ad-hoc fashion, but instead, can be configured into a unified resilience and intelligence ecosystem with a singular login, one digital point of entry, common workspaces or dashboards and secure information sharing to help each one work smarter.

Additionally, retail security solutions in 2026 are much more digitally oriented, enabling more “smart” features like the ability to set up automations and customizable workflows that can be more finely tailored to your organization’s specific needs. And as newer features become available, such as AI-driven functionality, most future software updates can be performed simply and wirelessly without the need for an expensive visit from a technician.

So what are the recommended elements of a unified retail security ecosystem built to protect your operation from organized retail crime? Typically, they fall into a few major categories:

• Proactive threat triage: When a threat or risk of organized retail crime or other external theft materializes into an active incident, a threat triage solution kicks into gear. This includes AI-driven threat verification to prevent false alerts, automations that can coordinate multiple devices while maintaining a human-in-the-loop approach and dynamic response plans with custom workflows that can easily be modified on the fly.
• Enterprise resilience solution: A secure software solution lets you address every pillar of your resilience program, including operational resilience, business continuity and physical safety protocols, all from one cohesive digital workspace. In addition to logging incidents, an enterprise resilience solution can help you manage deadlines, perform regular procedural maintenance, track compliance, test event scenarios and act as a dependable communication channel between employees, managers and other company stakeholders.
• Tactical response: When your employees detect an act of organized retail crime, it’s an emergency. A tactical response solution lets them alert the nearest dependable public safety agency or other first responders with one touch. Also, as responders are headed to their location to answer the call, this solution also acts as a beacon that sends your employees’ precise indoor location to emergency personnel.
• Critical communication: When an organized retail crime incident occurs, many people may need to know the most up-to-date information about a rapidly changing situation. A crisis communications solution enables the members of your incident response teams running point on internal and external communication to target different audiences across devices with either emergency or non-emergency messaging, whether it’s a specific segment of your organization, your entire organization or everyone within a geographic area.

The ongoing role of advanced digital solutions for ORC activity

Organized retail crime is projected to cost retailers tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue and shrink annually in the years to come. Retailers can bolster their protection against often violent and aggressive behavior through a combination of common-sense best practices to improve their overall resilience posture and the strategic deployment of advanced security management software built with next-gen connectivity.

With careful planning and some good luck, your retail operation can stay safer and more protected from future incidents of organized retail crime. And even as tactics used by ORC groups change or evolve over time, advanced digital solutions like Noggin provide the latest features and functionality to stay one step ahead. Request a product demonstration to see the platform in action.