Airport duty-free gang shipped stolen goods to the UK for years before police closed in

Eleven members of the international Preda Clan have been arrested after a major operation involving the Guardia Civil, Europol and police forces across four countries

It sounds almost brazen. A criminal gang quietly working its way through airport duty-free shops across Europe, pocketing high-value perfumes and tobacco, then shipping the lot to warehouses in England to be sold on the black market. For at least six years, that is exactly what the Preda Clan appears to have been doing.

The operation came to an end following an investigation that began in early 2025, led by Spain's Guardia Civil and Customs Surveillance Service and involving agents from the Fiscal and Border Section at Tenerife South and Santiago-Rosalía de Castro airports. Europol, the Portuguese Judicial Police, Romanian Police and British customs authorities were also involved.

Eleven people have been arrested, all foreign nationals from Romania, Algeria and Mali, facing 24 charges between them including organised crime, repeated theft, smuggling, document forgery and money laundering.

The gang had bases in A Coruña, the United Kingdom and Romania and is believed to have been operating since at least 2019. Its targets included airports in Tenerife South, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante, Barcelona, Valencia and Santiago de Compostela, as well as terminals in Antwerp, Lisbon and Porto.

The thefts were carefully organised, with members assigned specific roles. Some kept watch, others distracted shop staff, while others carried out the theft and got the goods out of the building. The stolen tobacco was then flown to the UK, where it fetched significantly higher prices and was sold through bazaars run by Kurdish and Pakistani nationals, according to the investigation. Clandestine warehouses in England were used to store the goods before resale.

The money side was equally sophisticated. The gang allegedly laundered more than €4.8 million through eight shell companies, created one after another specifically to make the money harder to trace, all ostensibly trading in second-hand vehicles but with no genuine business activity. They also used a technique known as smurfing, breaking cash into small deposits across multiple accounts to avoid triggering financial controls.

When officers finally moved in, raiding properties in Teo and Padrón in Galicia, they found the kind of haul that tells its own story. Gold bars, gold jewellery, bundles of cash in multiple currencies, thousands of cartons of tobacco and a trail of paperwork that helped unravel the whole operation.

Thirteen bank accounts in Spain were frozen, with a further 36 across Lithuania and Romania, and investigators seized or placed under control a total of 93 vehicles, a figure that gives some sense of just how long and how profitably this gang had been at it.
 

Image: Guardia Civil