Facial recognition technology firm Facewatch sent more than half a million real-time offender alerts to retailers in 2025, more than doubling the number issued the previous year.
The platform issued 516,739 alerts to its retail subscriber network last year, up from 252,943 alerts in 2024, marking an increase of just over 100% year-on-year.
On a daily basis, Facewatch now sends an average of 1,415 alerts a day, compared with 693 per day in 2024, according to the company.
The alerts are designed to notify retailers in near real time when known prolific and repeat offenders enter shop premises protected by Facewatch’s live facial recognition technology.
In July, the number of alerts sent in one week exceeded 10,000 for the first time, with 43,602 recorded across the entire month.
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Additionally, in December, the number of alerts sent in one week hit a new record, with 14,885 sent over the seven days up to Christmas Eve;
December’s total alerts also hit 54,312, marking a new monthly record.
Facewatch CEO Nick Fisher said that the figures illustrated the “industrial scale” of retail crime now facing businesses and the increasingly important role of technology in tackling it.
“Retailers are dealing with levels of theft and aggression that would have been unthinkable a few years ago,” he said.
“The fact that alerts have more than doubled in a single year reflects both the growth in repeat and organised offenders and the reality that retailers are under pressure to act faster, smarter and more collaboratively to keep employees and customers safe.”
In October, the British Independent Retailers Association (Bira) called for action after Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures revealed that 529,994 shoplifting offences had been recorded in the year ending June.
The data showed a 13% increase in shoplifting offences to 529,994 incidents, promoting Bira to describe the situation as a “retail crime crisis”.
During the same month, Iceland executive chair Richard Walker also insisted that the UK needed to tackle the daily shoplifting “war” on its high streets.
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