Organized retail crime rings have been targeted Ulta Beauty, according to investigators, and the company’s CEO Dave Kimbell is pointing the finger at e-commerce sites as being partly to blame.
″[Online marketplaces] give more scale and more opportunity for people to liquidate this product,” said Kimbell. “You used to have to sell stolen goods at flea markets or out of the trunk of your car, or maybe just locally. Now, you have more sophisticated tools to have a broader reach across the country or even internationally.”
Although he did not mention Amazon’s marketplace by name, CNBC cites an investigation into a San Diego woman and her husband who had $387,000 in suspected stolen goods, most of which had come from Ulta, and was selling them on her Amazon storefront.
“Unfortunately, I’m not that shocked because we’ve seen it in other parts of the country,” Kimbell said. “The magnitude of this one is significant. But this is what’s happening, and this is the environment in which we’re operating.”
