BURGLARIES are a perennial issue for homeowners on the Costa del Sol, and the problem isn’t getting easier.
Potential intruders looking to gain access to your residence range from amateur opportunists disguising themselves as joggers to professional criminal groups hailing from Eastern Europe and South America.
Burglars even broke into one home in Cancelada last month, and then returned twice more using a copy of keys stolen in the first raid.
That family’s ordeal is one of several cases that have put security back at the top of the agenda across the coast this year.
But one Marbella security expert has revealed his top tips for beating burglars on the Costa del Sol, as intruders grow more organised, tech-savvy and professional than ever.
COSTA DEL SOL’S NEW BREED OF BURGLAR
Bogdan Shadrin is co-founder of Dartel Solutions, a Marbella-based security installer that has fitted more than 350 alarm and camera systems across the Costa del Sol in three years of trading.
He explained how the gangs behind many of the break-ins around Spain operate almost like contractors operating in a criminal ecosphere, something investigators have dubbed ‘crime as a service’.
“It’s like a job, with expenses paid,” he said. “It’s really organised – and they also do their homework long before they strike.
“Let’s say they live in Holland. They receive an assignment to come to one place and rob a particular home. And then they leave.”
“It is not just two guys looking for fun,” he said. “They are real professionals, and they know exactly what they are doing.”
READ MORE: Pervert burglar spent 30 minutes watching naked woman sleep after breaking into Marbella home
THINK LIKE THE BURGLAR IS WATCHING YOU
Most alarmingly, this professionalism extends to surveillance deep into someone’s personal and private life – at least whatever they choose to share publicly online.
“They don’t just go and rob — they track people,” Shadrin explained of this new generation of professional thief.
“They follow their targets, they look at where they’re going, what they do, their social media, where they work.”
This approach relies less on hacking a system than on studying a person, a technique security professionals call social engineering, meaning the criminals gather what they need by observing and manipulating individuals rather than by breaking into any device or network.
“They really study the person first, and only then do they make the decision if they go in or not,” he said.
Social media is doing most of the work for them, in his view.
“People keep posting on social media,” he said. “They keep saying to their friends, we’re going here, we’re going there.”
This can be a particular problem on the Costa del Sol, where Instagram can serve as a real Trojan horse.
SOMEONE YOU TRUST WHILE YOU’RE AWAY
His actual advice is narrower and more practical than telling people to stop posting altogether.
Instead, look to have someone reliable who lives nearby, who can keep an eye on your property and take a look if something unusual or suspicious happens.
“To have someone reliable is really important.”
Timing compounds the risk, and Shadrin said most homeowners have the calendar backwards.
“The house is being robbed whenever it’s empty – October, Holy Week, winter,” he said. “There is no summer high season for a robbery. It’s the opposite.”
Geography plays a part too, in his experience, with Mijas being an area of the Costa del Sol most favoured by the burglars..
“It’s not a really crowded place,” he explained, “and there are a lot of big villas in the middle of nowhere, and this is what influences the chances of a robbery happening.”
The Costa del Sol is such a rich hunting ground for international thieves partly for the value of what they managed to steal, with burglars in Marbella managing to get away with takings double the value of the national average.
“In Marbella it’s around €2,500 or €2,600 that they steal on average.”
WHERE YOUR SECURITY SYSTEM IS WEAKEST
Hardware has improved a lot in the fight against the burglars, Shadrin said, ‘but of course, the criminals are improving as well’.
Drones are the newest addition to a burglar’s toolkit, according to what he has learned from his clients.
“That they see drones being used to test and activate sensors, to make the alarm go off and see if the system is armed,” he said.
However, this particular tech has yet to arrive on the Costa del Sol, he assured The Olive Press.
Another weakness in home security is Wi-Fi enabled cameras, which are very easy to deceive or deactivate.
Much better is to use CCTV cameras, which store footage locally on a memory card or hard drive at the property itself, separate from anything it also sends over the internet.
A camera that depends entirely on the property’s internet connection has nothing to fall back on if that connection is cut, deliberately or otherwise, and whatever happens while it is offline is simply never recorded.
But for all the talk of drones and cloned signals, Shadrin was clear that the most common form of break-in still looks nothing like a George Clooney heist film.
“The most common burglary is the normal one,” he said. Poor alarm maintenance causes more break-ins than any piece of exotic technology.
“Strong sunlight can wear alarm sensors out until they stop working,” he explained. “They need yearly maintenance, changing the batteries, someone overlooking that the sensor is pointing in the right direction.”
Meanwhile, many alarm systems are looking the wrong way entirely.
“Everything is on the front, not taking care of the back or the side entrances or an open window,” he said. “The front is never the main entrance for a robbery.”
READ MORE: Crafty burglars used glue threads on front doors to check if Costa Blanca homes were unoccupied
SERVICE YOUR SYSTEM AND TRUST YOUR INSTALLER
Buying an alarm is not the same as being protected by one, Shadrin said.
Sensors drift out of alignment and batteries fade, often unnoticed for months.
He insists every alarm system must be serviced once a year, and says homeowners should not assume a system still works because it did when it went in.
Meanwhile, he casts doubt on other security firms on the Costa del Sol, alleging that many use out-of-date technology and techniques.
“You need to really know who you’re going to trust with those installations,” he said.
Ultimately, customers don’t always understand when they’re signing a contract. “It’s not in their language, and they misunderstand. They know they have an app, but they don’t know what it’s for.”
Privacy is the other blind spot.
“We’ve seen a lot of clients whose previous companies had all the footage from their property recorded and stored for years and years and years,” he said.
He tells every new client to agree a hard deletion policy with their provider from day one rather than assume one exists.
“Put a deadline on the information,” he said. “For example, every two months, delete all the recordings you have. That’s really important.”
Even once a system is installed correctly by a company a homeowner trusts, he said, it still needs to be checked, not just left running.
THE OLDEST TRICKS IN THE BOOK
Another common trick to watch out for is thieves leaving markers on doors to see if people are home.
He said the classic image of a burglar leaving a mark or a thread across a door is less common in his experience than a blunter version of the same test.
“That’s not really the kind of thing that’s really common,” he said of deliberate door markers. “The most common thing is the other stuff — putting a paper or a nail to see if the door opens, if it really moves.”
He said he had never had complaints matching the marked-door story.
“It’s more focused on paper, something that can be moved whenever the door opens — things you’re not really going to see if you don’t look closely.”
Whatever the method, his advice on spotting it is the same: report it immediately rather than dismiss it.
“If you see something like this, the police always recommend reporting it,” he said, so officers can investigate before a property is targeted again.
He said gangs rarely stop at a single house once they have decided an area is worth their time.
“Whenever they do this kind of stuff, they do it massively,” he said. “They go into an urbanisation or a street and hit the whole street, the whole urbanisation.”
SEPARATING FACT FROM FICTION
But not every rumour about burglary tactics holds up.
Shadrin dismissed the urban legend about burglars using knockout gas pumped through a property’s air conditioning to keep occupants asleep while they are robbed.
“I would say this is not something true, and I never heard of it here in Spain,” he said. “Whenever you inhale it, you first start coughing — you’d wake up coughing before you fell asleep. So it’s not really a thing for robbing houses.”
Signal jammers are real, he said, but he has not seen them used against homes on the Costa del Sol.
“It’s a thing, but not here in Spain,” he said. “They’re mostly used for cars.”
He explained how the device actually works, since the word ‘jammer’ undersells what it does.
“It’s a tool that captures the signal of something and replicates it,” he said. “So when you’re opening your car and there’s someone with a tool like this, they capture the signal that gives control of your car, and they replicate it to open it with that same signal.”
In plain terms, the device does not block a signal so much as steal and reuse it, letting a thief unlock a car without ever touching the original key. So one to worry about for owners of cars, but not homes.
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