7 security mistakes made at trade shows

New York--A little more than a month from now, the industry will converge on Las Vegas for five days of buying and selling and, most likely, monetary losses due to stone swaps, snatch-and-grabs and case cutting. 

Jewelers’ Security Alliance statistics show that in 2014, trade shows ranked behind only highways/streets and parking lots as the most frequent scenes for off-premises crimes last year--and those are just the losses that were reported to the JSA. 

At a meeting held Thursday in New York, Itay Hendel, head of ISPS-USA Security Consultants LLC, a firm with offices in Israel and New York that does security training for the jewelry industry, used security footage shot in booths at trade shows worldwide and clips from local newscasts to highlight the main mistakes exhibitors and traveling salespeople make that lead to losses.

His overriding message to those who attended his lecture, which was sponsored by Jewelers Mutual Insurance Co., was this: Ultimately, exhibitors have to be the ones in control of what’s going on in their booths at all times, who’s coming in, who’s going out, and how they’re behaving when inside.  

“It’s about control,” he said. “No one will step to our booth without our permission.” 

1) Not watching smartphones carefully enough. Probably one of the biggest security conundrums confronting both retailers and exhibitors these days is the ubiquity of smartphones. People and their phones are seemingly inseparable --they use them to take pictures, text and share on social media constantly. 

While Hendel said that exhibitors don’t need to ban the use of smartphones in their booth entirely, they need to watch people who have them in hand. It’s fine if they want to use the phone to take a picture of a stone but they don’t need to keep it in their hand while handling loose diamonds, he said. Hendel there have been a number of incidences at trade shows recently where the perpetrators used a smartphone to help them pull off a stone swap. 

2) Letting surfaces get cluttered. Don’t let visitors to the booth, or to a retail store for that matter, clutter the table or the showcase with show maps, shopping bags or random pieces of paper. As Hendel showed in a video, thieves often use maps and the like to distract from theft, and jewelry easily can be slipped into shopping bags. 

3) Thinking it’s just a coincidence.