The Client

Bang & Olufsen is a manufacturer and retailer of top-of-the-range televisions, music systems, loudspeakers, telephones, and multimedia products.

The company was founded in 1925 in Struer, a small town in the north western part of Denmark, by two young engineers, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen. Bang & Olufsen products are sold mainly through its independent retail network across more than 100 countries. The majority of these retailers are concept stores, which exclusively sell Bang & Olufsen products.

The Challenge

Red Alert was contacted by one of its existing customers, an independent Bang & Olufsen retailer, to investigate the stores mysteriously shrinking stock. Although a monitored burglar alarm had been installed, the manager of the store couldn’t work out how or where the stock was going.

The stock seemed to be disappearing overnight but the installed alarm wasn’t being triggered. The manager was at a loss to know what was happening so called in Red Alert security engineers to investigate the problem.

The Solution

Although the alarm wasn’t being triggered, it was obvious someone was entering the property at night. Red Alert engineers set the alarm to trigger an alert to the monitoring service centre if the alarm was turned off or on at any unusual times. What they discovered was that the alarm was being turned on and off by someone who had a key and knew the code!

The police were called in – and it wasn’t long before they caught the culprit. A former employee who had copied the key and knew the code to the alarm system.

In line with the current Code of Practice, Red Alert has subsequently installed a new system that uses fobs rather than codes, to significantly reduce the risk of this happening again.