‘Rolex Rippers’ target retired airline pilot in daylight robbery

ARETIRED pilot from the Cotswolds has told how he fell victim to a female gang dubbed the ‘Rolex Rippers’ for preying on men with expensive watches.

Michael Parry had his £15,000 watch stolen by a woman who asked him to sign a petition and then grabbed him and repeatedly shouted “sex” to create a distraction.

It was only later the 84-year-old realised that he had lost his expensive Rolex in a daylight robbery – in the middle of Bourton-on-the-Water.

A friend later pointed out that there had been a spate of similar crimes in Dorset – as previously reported by the Western Daily Press – by a female gang dubbed the ‘Rolex Rippers’.

Often posing as charity workers, the young women approach men outside golf clubs or shops in wealthy areas asking for help, before creating a disturbance so they can steal the exclusive time pieces which sell for tens of thousands of pounds.

Michael was putting his shopping on the passenger seat of his electric Mini in the Co-op car park when a woman approached him.

She put her fingers across her mouth to imply she could not speak and then gave him a petition to support ‘dumb’ people, which he signed.

But suddenly without warning the woman then started grappling with him.

“She was gripping me so close and it was so out of the blue, I didn’t know what the hell ...” he told the Daily Mail.

“And then she started to scream. She screamed one word over and over again. Sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! If you had walked past, you would have thought I was attacking her.

“I’ve been in an awful lot of situations in my life but I’ve not come across anything like this.”

After the woman ran away and jumped into a car, Michael started to drive home and realised the GMTMaster Rolex he bought five years ago for £6,500 was missing.

Today it is worth over £15,000.

“It was a carefully planned operation,” he said.

“You don’t expect someone to mug you at 11am in a Bourton supermarket.”

The store manager managed to find CCTV footage showing a silver Citroen C4 just yards away – which Gloucestershire police believe was being driven by an accomplice.

But the car number plates turned out to be fake, and Michael appears to have been one of dozens of victims of the gang who ask for signatures or donations and then start screaming or making unwelcome sexual advances as a distraction. The woman who struck in Bourton was wearing trousers, trainers, a baseball cap and a surgical mask. She was 5ft 5in with mousey hair tied back.

Michael was robbed during the summer but there have been more reports since – with fears that some victims are too embarrassed to come forward.

Gloucestershire Police have confirmed they were called to a report of a robbery at a supermarket car park in Bourton-on-the-Water at around 11.20am on Thursday, July 8, after a man told them a woman carrying a clipboard had asked him to sign a petition.

“Following the report police attended, searched the area and conducted house to house enquires as well as CCTV enquiries,” it said in a statement. Nearly a dozen similar cases have been reported in Dorset in the past three months.