Keep The Criminals At Bay With These Practices

The best way to safeguard your jewelry against theft is to secure your home or apartment. Berkley Asset Protection suggests these practices.

• Lights – install motion-detection security lights around the exterior of your home and property. Make sure to install them higher up and outside of reach, so they cannot be broken or moved easily.
• Cameras – a leading crime deterrent is to install security cameras and smart doorbells with cameras controlled from your phone.
• Make your home look occupied even when you are not home. Keep hallway lights on and blinds closed, and ensure that other valuables like electronics, cannot be seen from the exterior, especially when you are not home.
• Make it look difficult to break in your home with deadbolt locks, alarms and signage.
• Keep your garage door closed and locked and lock any other less obvious entry points an intruder could use to get into your home such as basement windows, side or patio doors.

Protect Your Jewelry When You Travel.

We all love a good vacation post on social media! Unfortunately, so do criminals. Be careful what you share about your travels. Thieves often do their research and can figure out when targets will and will not be home, what they could swipe, and where they could find those items in a home, based on information someone shares on Facebook.

Also, be sure to tell your neighbors when you’re leaving for vacation and ask them to keep a look out for any suspicious activity.

Store Your Jewelry Safely

That beautiful jewelry box sitting on your dresser may look cute, but storing your expensive pieces in them is an open invitation for bad guys. Keep your fun, fashion pieces in the box, but consider storing your valuables (both sentimentally and monetarily) in a home safe.

And don’t put that safe in your closets and master bedroom (these areas are the most frequently targeted by intruders) A better place would be less obvious room such as a spare bedroom, basement or office. And wall safes are readily available too. Easy to install and easy to conceal with a picture frame, a wall safe also makes you feel like a secret agent!

Be Safe When You Travel

Personally, I don’t travel with my “good” jewelry. To keep my stress low on vacation, I usually just bring some fun costume pieces, and a cubic zirconia wedding ring (Old Navy and Target carry some good fakes!)

On occasion, I do have to bring my valuable jewelry. My advice: never leave your pieces out on dressers or vanities. Instead, use the in-room safes, or the hotel safes to store your jewels when you’re not wearing them.

Don’t Forget To Insure Your Jewelry!

While some jewelry losses can be prevented with some safe jewelry practices, nothing is failproof. That’s why insuring your jewelry (and your other valuables) is so important.

Put a reminder on your phone to update your jewelry appraisals every five years, and then add them to your home or renters policies, or on a jewelry specific policy. The cost is relatively small, and at least you’ll be able to replace those pieces if a loss occurs.

When our customers go on an exotic vacation, we always tell them to buy that jewelry souvenir, but don’t spend a lot of money on it. Just in case…

Well, we need to start following our own advise!

While walking the streets of playa del Carmen, trying NOT to get assaulted by the street vendors, we wandered into a cute little jewelry store. It was filled with leather wallets, “handcrafted” pottery (stamped Made in China!), and, of course, lots of jewelry.

We decided that we wanted to get matching sterling silver bracelets to remember our trip. (I know, kind of hokey, but there was a lot of tequila flowing that week!)

Right off the bat, we told the store owner that we too, were jewelers. And that we ONLY wanted to see jewelry stamped 925 (which means pure sterling silver in the international world, not plated, costume pieces). We were so smug.

So Mr. Mexican Jewelry Store Owner started pulling out “the good stuff” from under the counter. We sorted through a ton of bracelets until we found a pair that looked unisex. The geometric, linked style also reminded us of Mexico and the Aztec influence. We loved them.

The bracelets were clearly stamped to be sterling silver – we even used a jeweler’s loupe to examine them. They also felt heavy like sterling silver should be for bracelets of that size. And, they weren’t magnetic – a SURE sign that they could be costume jewelry. We were not only smug, but smart!

The only trouble was that Scott’s bracelet was a tad to small. But, Mr. Mexican Jewelry Store Owner had a fabulous solution: he could cut off a link from a third bracelet and, since we were jewelers, we could attach it ourselves when we returned to the States. Awesome idea.

So we started negotiating. We weighed the bracelets, and, knowing the price per gram of sterling silver, made an offer which we felt was fair, but also a great deal for us.

Mr. Mexican Jewelry Store Owner and Scott went back and forth, until they finally settled on $300 AND a glass tequila bottle and matching shot glass set thrown in for free. Cash.

Note to self: never pay cash out of the country.

We were thrilled. We spent the rest of our trip relaxing, laughing and playing in the beautiful sunshine.

And when we went home (to 2′ of new snow), we excitedly told our staff about our great deal on matching bracelets. Jon, our talented bench jeweler, said he could put Scott’s bracelet back together right then.

All that had to be done was to solder (that’s using a torch to join 2 pieces of metal together) the new link onto the bracelet. Except, when he heated the piece up, ALL OF THE SILVER COATING MELTED OFF!

WTH?

It was fake. A good fake, but completely and professionally counterfeit. The sterling silver bracelet was actually a copper bracelet heavily plated with silver – worth $10 tops. It was made especially to fool tourists into thinking it was sterling silver and worth a bigger price tag. We were duped.

And since we paid cash, there was no recourse from the credit card company. We couldn’t even file a claim against the store.

We were initially very upset, then embarrassed. I’m sure Mr. Mexican Jewelry Store Owner was laughing all the way to the bank about the “jewelry store owners who were fooled by his cheap jewelry.” It stung.

So, what are we going to do? Well, since we’re custom jewelers – we’re going to recreate the bracelets with our CAD technology out of real sterling silver! And, we’re going to go back to Mexico and … lay in the sun! Life’s too short to hold a grudge!