When villagers saw people popping in and out of a house in the centre of the pretty Cheshire village of Prestbury last week, they assumed they were all there to undertake renovation work.
Indeed, because Lilac Cottage had been gutted by fire last June, they were relieved that restoration work was finally being done.
For something was indeed being done – just not quite what everyone was assuming.
While some of those going in were legitimate tradespeople, other ‘workmen’ squirrelled away in the boarded-up property were not restoring it but digging a secret tunnel via the cottage’s Victorian fireplace to give them access to next door.
It sounds like a sophisticated gold heist, but the target wasn’t bullion – but handbags.
At 11.40pm on Sunday evening the raiders achieved their aim, breaking into the ground floor of the Dress Cheshire boutique – bottoms first, as owner Christine Colbert can testify, having watched the scene unfold in real time on CCTV from her bedroom several miles away.
In the space of just over three minutes, the men scooped up 55 designer handbags – worth a total of £260,000 – launching them through the hole in the fireplace before disappearing almost as fast as they’d arrived. The police, alerted by the alarm system, arrived moments too late.
Among the goods taken were a £3,500 Chanel Red Tote and a £3,200 Chanel vanity bag, a £1,895 Gucci Marmont and a £1,600 Bottega Veneta Tote – although Christine believes the real targets were her collection of Hermès bags, which made up about £200,000 of the overall loss.
The most expensive, a Hermès Kelly 32 Black Crocodile bag with gold hardware is worth £24,000.
But several Birkin bags were also stolen, including a Hermès Birkin 25 Camel Swift worth £20,000 and a Birkin 30 Black Togo costing £18,000.
A few days on from the theft, Christine is devastated and flabbergasted by their audacity.
‘This is my livelihood, a business I have worked so hard to build up. It’s heartbreaking,’ she said this week, revealing it’s the second time she’s been targeted in a year.
Along with other residents of Cheshire’s Golden Triangle – the name given to this affluent area around the villages of Wilmslow, Alderley Edge and Prestbury which is home to wealthy footballers, entertainment industry figures and businesses – she is left wondering whether thieves are roaming the area with the sole aim of acquiring designer ‘wagbags’ to sell on the black market.
Certainly, Christine’s is not the first ‘handbag heavy’ property to have been targeted in the last couple of years – with several other sophisticated raids on homes and businesses in the surrounding area.
Three months ago in Alderley Edge – known as the ‘Knightsbridge of the North’ – a gang of thieves broke into a detached property using a ladder to access a skylight and made off with 100 designer handbags.
Among them were a £48,000 Barenia Kelly picnic bag, a crocodile Hermès Birkin worth £43,000, and a £28,000 ostrich leather Hermes Birkin.
Alongside some jewellery and a Rolex watch, the overall haul was in the region of £1million.
The distraught victim, who has chosen to remain anonymous, offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone connected to the crime but no-one has been arrested.
Less than a month later, Melanie Kamayou, the wife of Manchester United goalkeeper Andre Onana, had her £62,000 Hermès Birkin handbag stolen in the car park of an Italian restaurant in the same village. Liam Ross, a 25-year-old from Bradford, is to face trial for the theft in September.
Around the same time, ex-Bristol City player Nicky Maynard, 38, and his wife Tara, 35, returned to their home in Nantwich to find thieves had stolen her collection of 30 designer handbags, which included prized Chanels.
The gang – whom the couple later revealed had been spying on them via a camera taped to a bush pointed at their front door – also took Cartier and Rolex watches.
Tara made the news public in an Instagram post in which she pleaded with her followers to keep an eye out for contraband belonging to her that was being sold on: ‘If anybody hears or they’re selling any of my bags girls, everybody knows what I’ve got… please, please tell me,’ she begged.
It may be cold comfort for her, and Christine, that the scourge is nationwide: figures from the Met Police in response to a freedom of information request showed that thefts of luxury handbags in the capital had risen 13 per cent in one year, to 2,349 in 2023 – the most recent figures available.
The most targeted postcodes were the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.
Two hundred miles north the prosperous residents of Cheshire do not need statistics to tell them that black market demand is high. They can see it first-hand.
Or second hand, in Christine Colbert’s case.
Christine, who also runs a marketing agency, set up her business in 2018 as a venue for the sale of pre-loved luxury goods.
Since then she has become a particularly trusted dealer in luxury bags, working on a commission basis with clients who bring her their items to sell.
But Sunday’s theft came only a year after thieves first broke into Dress Cheshire, on that occasion making off with £180,000 of leatherware.
In March 2024, they climbed over the back fence of the property and removed the window on the first floor, bypassing the shutters, alarms and sensors on the ground floor.
Within exactly 39 minutes – 30 to take the window frame out, nine to get their hands on the loot – they made off in a getaway car. ‘They took about 40 bags, and rinsed us of around £180,000,’ Christine says. While an alarm was activated, it was not directly connected to the police, and with no-one raising an alert, it wasn’t until she walked into her shop the next morning that she learned what had happened.
‘We walked into carnage,’ she says. ‘They had smashed up the whole shop.’ CCTV footage showed that the thieves had entered at 8pm in the evening, not long after Christine had left.
Feeling ‘poleaxed’, Christine substantially tightened security, installing new bars and shutters, anti-climb spikes and an alarm system direct to the police, while worrying that her insurance company would not pay out.
‘They did, but it took five months, during which time I got trolled on social media,’ she says. ‘People were saying it was an inside job, and that customers wouldn’t get their money. It was a very ugly and horrible time.’
Fast forward 14 months, and Christine, and husband Gary, found themselves sitting in bed watching on her mobile as another handbag theft took place at her business.
Alerted by their security company they watched the men dressed in black with goggles, balaclavas, and gloves – crouching down with bricks all over the floor.
She said: ‘I said to Gary, “We’re being robbed!” I was panicking …. I said “how have they got in?” Then as soon as I saw the hole, I shouted, “They’ve got in through the chimney!”’
After rewinding the tape, she discovered the robbers had been drilling for over an hour, after which they burrowed through to her store and, as Christine looked on, ‘whirled’ around the shop grabbing as many bags as they could. ‘One man had a duvet tied round his neck like a pouch which he threw the bags in,’ she recalls. ‘Another man put everything up his arms – they were full of bags. Then they hurled the handbags through the hole, two or three at a time. The respect for the bags was zero.’
They even dropped a couple of bags on the way, which were damaged beyond repair.
‘Although they stole every bag they could get their hands on, I believe what they came for was the Hermès because the after-sale market is so buoyant.
‘Bags can fetch up to four times what they were worth new,’ she says. She believes it is the same gang who targeted her last time. ‘I think these guys will have been paid a fixed rate to break in, get the bags and what they’ve taken has gone up the chain to be sold privately and discreetly.’
Tina Lipfriend, founder of luxury handbag rental company, BagButler, believes many of these bags are ‘stolen to order, rather like luxury cars’.
She says: ‘These will disappear into a black market somewhere, and frankly the thieves haven’t got to work hard to find their market because it’s ravenous. There are always people looking to expand their collection.’
The exponential rise in value of designer bags in recent years has made them even more covetable, along with the fact that many bags are now worth more second- hand if they are rare.
‘There have been massive price hikes in luxury bags from Covid onwards,’ Tina says. ‘All sorts of reasons have been given for this, from the increase in materials right through to the war in Ukraine, but whatever the reasons the reality is that some bags have almost doubled in value in the last five years.’
That includes one of her own, a Chanel caviar leather bag she bought in 2019 for £5,500 and which would now retail for £9,000.
Tina’s sentiments are echoed by Charlotte Staerck, founder of The Handbag Clinic, a restoration service and retailer established in 2013. She once helped restore a Hermès Birkin with diamond hardware worth £140,000 in 2016 (‘it will be worth a lot more now’) and says she first started to realise that luxury bags had become a specific focus for thieves from 2019 onwards, when her store in Chelsea was hit by repeated burglary attempts.
‘Now barely a week goes by without a client telling me that one of her own handbags has been stolen,’ she says.
‘What’s interesting is that in the past it was largely Chanel and Hermès that were the main targets, but now the span is a lot wider. Demand has definitely increased on all fronts.’
Back at Dress Cheshire, this week police released CCTV footage showing the three raiders and appealed for help to identify them. Several similar raids have been perpetrated by foreign gangs who leave the country before police can catch them.
Among them were Francisca Santana, 19 and 33-year-old Rosa Dotes-Perez, who targeted the £3million home of Steve and Bernadette Pinkerton in June 2023.
The thieves flew in from Chile when the 62-year-old victims, who run a financial services company, were away.
They took jewellery and designer bags worth £15,000. Both were jailed, along with fellow Chilean Jean Paul Pizarro-Carrasco, 32 who had ‘scouted’ the home.
Police say 300 Chilean ‘burglary tourists’ have been arrested in just three years in the UK, with targets including celebrity chef Marcus Wareing.
Little wonder that wealthier residents of the Golden Triangle and beyond are using rapid-response security companies. Either way, it seems that such is the determination of the ‘WAG bag gangs’ that their resourcefulness knows no bounds.
‘How do you stop someone burrowing through a wall?’ asks Christine. ‘The lengths they go to are extraordinary.’
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