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Shoplifting is down. Retailers spent the last two years bolting on cameras, locking up merchandise, and training staff to de-escalate confrontations, and the investment is showing up in the numbers. But a new industry-wide study out this summer makes one thing clear: the criminals didn’t go away. They moved — into phone scams, gift card fraud, and loyalty-account theft that most shoppers will never see coming.
The Shoplifting Numbers Are Real
According to The Impact of Theft & Violence 2026, a study released July 30th by the National Retail Federation and the Loss Prevention Research Council, retailers reported a 12.4% drop in shoplifting incidents and an 8.1% decline in merchandise theft in 2025 compared with 2024. The survey covered 66 companies operating 143 retail brands, representing $1.7 trillion in annual sales — roughly a third of all U.S. retail activity. NRF credits better security systems and employee training for the improvement.
Where the Criminals Went Instead
The same report shows external theft and fraud rising even as walk-out shoplifting falls. Retailers reported phone scams up 69%, loyalty-account fraud up 51%, and gift card theft or fraud up 42%. Half of retailers say repeat offenders are a growing problem, 40% report a rise in organized retail crime incidents specifically, and 37% cite an increase in “walkout” or “pushout” theft, where groups simply carry merchandise out the door in bulk. NRF Vice President David Johnston called it “the evolving nature of organized retail criminals exploiting both the physical and digital retail environments.”
The Reporting Gap
Perhaps the more telling number in the study has nothing to do with theft methods. It’s this: 63% of retailers say they report fewer than half of theft incidents to police at all. Asked why, 60% cited losses too small to meet felony thresholds, and 54% pointed to a lack of confidence that law enforcement would follow through. That’s not a crime wave hiding in plain sight — it’s a quiet agreement between retailers and the system that most of this simply isn’t worth reporting anymore.
A Bill Stuck in the Senate
Congress has a response sitting on the table. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act passed the U.S. House earlier this year and would give federal, state, and local law enforcement better tools to track cross-jurisdictional and transnational theft rings — the kind increasingly named in NRF’s surveys. As of this report, it remains stalled in the Senate.
The theft didn’t disappear. It just stopped showing up on a security camera.
What This Means for the Index
This is a pattern the Index keeps running into: a headline number improves while the underlying behavior simply adapts to the new defenses. Shoplifting is a crude, visible crime that cameras and security tags can deter. Fraud, loyalty theft, and organized scam networks are quieter, harder to prosecute, and — per retailers’ own admission — rarely even reported. A society doesn’t get safer when wrongdoing goes underground; it gets a worse picture of its own condition. The people writing the crime statistics increasingly aren’t counting the crime that’s actually happening, and a bill built to close that gap has been sitting in the Senate for months.
Thursday August 27th 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index