The victims light into the background of the infantile fog that portrays harmful watch thieves as modern-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the wealthy to feed the poor.
Looking the Rolex Rippers aired this week on the BBC’s youth channel, BBC3, and may be discovered on iPlayer.
The documentary by journalist Tir Dhondy revolves round conferences with gang members and particularly one in every of their leaders, the at all times masked and voice-changed mastermind, who goes by the 007-inspired codename M.
Understandably enthusiastic about being approached by these so-called Rolex rippers on Instagram – violent crime appears to be a path to notoriety on social media – Ms Dhondy asks the gang members questions on how they monitor down their victims with the assistance of low-paid “spotters”. determine. in rich London hotspots, how they scare them with two-foot-long machetes into handing over their luxurious watches, and what they give thought to their crimes.
M is the star of the present. With a Rolex Skydweller that’s believed to have been stolen, he’s allowed to painting himself as a sufferer of an unequal society through which its wealthy individuals are asking for bother by flaunting their wealth with £20,000 watches. “To me, that’s cash on his wrist,” M insists.
At one level, M is interviewed in a neighborhood that even he describes as seedy and asks a servant to deliver him his gun for cover.
The sequence hero and his interrogator escape earlier than unseen rival gang members method them.
Pure Hollywood.
Regardless of clips of horrific threats of violence, there may be little point out of the influence on victims.
TV stars Spencer Matthews and Aled Jones are seen as examples of these on the mistaken finish of those gangs, however that maybe makes it even simpler for BBC3 audiences to consider overprivileged victims who’re someway begging for it.
In 2022, this system says, the variety of watch thefts worldwide could have elevated by an estimated 60 p.c. Right this moment, it’s the crime of alternative for a lot of criminals as a result of it’s simpler and extra profitable than drug trafficking, they are saying.
Easy and profitable, that is the takeaway from this BBC documentary about this horrible crime.
Paul Thorpe, a watch vendor turned social media journalist, stated he was “dissatisfied” by what he described as a “fictional drama”, regardless of having labored with Ms Dhondy [without being credited] whereas researching the present.
In a YouTube video he’s joined by Scottish Watches co-host Rikki, who described the entire thing as “staged and pretend”.
