Dr. N.
One of the most widespread concerns among owners of Watches, especially if luxury, is that of how keep your timepiece collection safe from thieves.
In this article we see together how to defend yourself from watch thieves in five steps.
The tips for defending watches from thieves concern both the safety of your valuables and the protection of your home. Let's start with the latter category.
Step 1: Protect your watches by thinking like a thief
Imagine being locked out of your home without your keys. How do you get in? Begin to imagine where you might access it. You could climb over the gate, go up to the first floor, force a window. Or that dormer on the roof, so exposed: you might not make it, but an athletic thief can easily climb up to the roof. Having done this thought experiment, ask yourself how long it would take you to access your home and how much effort you would have made.
Here, the more time, means and effort it takes to enter your home, the safer your home is from thieves. You can then proceed to make your home safer by strengthening the points where you imagine you can enter.
Step 2: Protect Watches with Deterrence
Let us remember that from the thief's point of view, stealing is just a job. He wants nothing more than to enter, steal and exit without being disturbed and without finding resistance or being identified. What the thief is looking for is a sure shot, without hindrance.
So:
- Fate believe the thief which will have high odds to find resistance. This means inducing the illusion in the criminal that we are at home. To do this, a simple timer that turns the lights on and off is very useful. But be careful: don't turn on the light in the entrance room, because it's not natural for someone to be in there all day. Better to turn it on in an internal part of the house, such as the living room or bedroom. Also remember to let neighbors or friends empty the mailbox: if it overflows it is a sure sign of absence, especially during the holiday period;
- Stop the thief from doing a visual survey of your home. This means curtains on the windows and avoiding that you can see through the house, from side to side, through glass surfaces and open spaces without interruptions;
- Make the thief afraid of being identified. A camera system pointed towards the street and the main access points of the house leads the thief to think that he will be caught, and this is a risk he does not want to take;
- Install a alarm system connected via mobile phone to the Police and write it in plain sight on the gate. The thief knows that cutting the telephone wires will not prevent the alarm from being triggered, and the intervention of the FFO will make the time available to him to carry out the theft shorter;
- If you have a calendar where you write down your appointments, do not leave it so that it is visible from the street through a window. The thief, with simple binoculars, will read "Dentist at 16" and will know that at that moment you will not be at home;
- If the thief expects to find valuable goods, he will be more willing to enter the house. Avoid bragging about your valuables to your neighbors, and do not leave them in parts of the house that are visible from the outside. The thief does a cost-benefit calculation: if he doesn't expect to find much inside, he won't go inside.
Step 3: Protect the watches with resistance
The longer it takes the thief to enter your home, the higher the risk of him being discovered, and the more likely he will be withdrawn. Then:
- Install sturdy doors and windows, safe, possibly with laminated glass to avoid breaking through;
- Install good quality locks on all doors that give outwards, both the entrance doors and the French doors on the terraces;
- Make sure the dormers are well defended and difficult to open. A few simple pins will be enough to nullify the effort of an attacker who tries to enter from the roof;
- Le railings windows work: it takes time and effort to overcome them. If you don't find them too overwhelming aesthetically, they're a great idea.
Step 4: Protect the watches with hiding places
The place in the house where the thief expects to find valuables is the master bedroom, followed by the children's bedrooms and the living room. These are therefore the places where it is best to avoid leaving values.
So where can we hide, in our home, luxury and precious watches such as gold, jewels and other values?
- We use little considered areas of the house. Service places like the Laundry, closet, dispensation, garage, tool shed, with due care, they are ideal places to hide your valuables;
- We choose hiding places where other metal things are usually stored. A thief equipped with metal detector portable - they are rare but not very rare - will not become suspicious when detecting a signal from an area where there is normally metal. Toolboxes, fake power sockets, chandelier supports, fake pipes, grocery cans emptied and piled up together with the full ones ... There are many places where you would not think to look for precious objects and that give a false positive signal to a metal detector ;
- Let's be careful with double bottoms of the drawers. They are a classic hiding place and they work, but they must be well fixed, because usually the criminal will overturn the drawers to the ground and if not well secured the double bottom opens;
- If we use a safe to keep our valuables, let's make sure that it is fixed to the wall, possibly load-bearing, with very long screws, so that it is not easy to remove it. The rule, for thieves, is not to break into the safes, but to take them away and open them calmly in a suitable place.
Step 5: Protect the watches with concealment
We have seen how to make our home safe and how to prevent thieves from finding the most important valuables. But what if we think about ... What to make him find?
The idea is less foolish than it might seem. The thief enters the house to find something to steal and continues to search until he has "paid off for the day". If the danno that we fear we may receive from the mess that the criminal causes to our home is greater than the loss of a few thousand euros, it may be more convenient to let the thief find something: an "owl clock". For example, if a thief finds a used Rolex for two thousand euros, eight or nine hundred euros in cash, and another thousand in jewels, in a house full of period furniture and fine paintings, the loss of securities may be less " painful "than having the property packed up by house rats.
Another trick is to leave a list of your watches and jewelry in an envelope that the thief will find, for example in the master bedroom sock drawer. There it is written that thevaluable Rolex watch, along with the pearl necklace and diamond bracelet, is found in one safe-deposit box. Finding the list, the thief will understand that those goods are inaccessible and will not look any further, or at least limit his efforts. Then, if you add the owl watch for a few hundred or thousand euros to the list and let him find it, the thief will be satisfied and we will have limited the damage.
If you choose the way of the owl clock, you have to calibrate the choice so that there is a proportion between the type of house and the stolen goods found. If the thief finds a battery-powered Citizen in a villa with a pool, he will keep searching. If it finds a Rolex used from three thousand euros, he goes away satisfied avoiding to overturn half the house and find the Patek Philippe from seventy thousand euros well hidden.
One last tip: what if you protect your watches by not keeping them at home?
Are you sure that the best solution is to keep the watches at home? There are many institutions that offer the possibility to leave your valuables, be it watches, jewelry or even important documents, with safety deposit boxes monitored and protected. Thieves are unlikely to attack places designed to repel them: bank robberies are noisy in the media but statistically rare.
The reason why many do not opt for bank safes is the need to open a linked account, in addition to the fact that this practice is viewed with disfavour by Italian taxation, which tends to consider the bank safe as a sign of high income capacity. But they also exist non-banking solutions, in various European countries. In Italy, currently, the only non-bank entity to offer a service of improperly said safety boxes for watches, or rather, of compartments for values is Secure Door, based in Verona, but it is likely that similar services will also be born in other cities of the Peninsula in the future.
