‘Smashing the counters’: Teenagers were recruited to rob several Montreal-area jewelry stores, police say
Posted November 12, 2026 6:58 am.
Montreal police say they arrested 14 people, six of them teenagers, who were allegedly involved in a series of jewelry store thefts in the Montreal area over the past few months.
The underage suspects range in age from 14 to 17 years old and are believed to have been recruited to commit the crimes. Five of the adults – aged 19 to 31 – as well as the six teens are facing armed robbery charges.
The SPVM is describing the group as an organized criminal network that began their operation in February but ramped up operations as of June. Stores were hit in Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, and Rosemère, police say.
“Yesterday we also arrested different cells. When I say cells, it’s the people who are organizing and planning those crimes,” said Iad Hanna, an SPVM commander with special projects investigations. “Basically, the people who are exploiting those children. That’s what they are, children.”
Montreal police say the people who allegedly recruited the teenagers to go through with the armed robberies put contracts in chat groups on social media. Once recruited, plans were allegedly put in place to commit the jewelry theft.
“When they have what they call as soldiers, they plan the crime,” said Hanna. “They tell them where to go and they provide them with the material to commit the crime and the stolen car and the driver. And then they ask them to drop all the jewelries at the drop point and from that the organization is going to take the gold or what they stole and bring it to the sponsors.”
In addition to the arrests, Montreal police say they seized $3.9 million worth of jewelry, cash, and other evidence.
Many of the jewelry stores targeted are in shopping malls. Del Moral Jewellers in the Champlain Mall on Montreal’s South Shore has been robbed five times in the past three years. The most recent smash and grab happened in August of this year.
“Well, we’ve had a few incidents here actually,” said owner Miguel Del Moral. “So in the mall here on the South Shore and basically like five young guys run in and start smashing the counters. We’ve seen it almost every day of the week. It happened to us. It’s just over and over again. So it’s really scary and we hope that they got them here for the last time. We’ll see.”
“It’s really sad to hear that there’s so many youngsters involved and it’s really sad to hear, but I’m glad that they’re really going to be on top of it this time. It seems like they really got all of them, hopefully.”
The Royale d’Or jewelry store in the Place Versailles shopping mall in Montreal was also targeted by thieves twice in recent months. In September and then in October, robbers stole thousands of dollars in gold jewelry.
“The law needs to be changed and what do I want? Children of the age of 14 or 15 even need to be punished,” said store owner Nafissa Nartayeva. “It’s not like someone is going to say, ‘Go, go, go steal, nothing is going to happen to you.’ No, you have to punish them, you have to explain, you have to change the law, you have to be more severe.”
“We recently surveyed our members and 89 per cent of them said that the federal government should strengthen the criminal code to increase penalties for organized retail crimes such as coordinated theft. So that’s exactly what we saw in the instance of jewelry,” said Vincent Pâquet, the director of legislative affairs for Quebec at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).
The Montreal police said that they have made a total of 40 arrests since September after putting together a task force to address 55 jewelry store robberies since the beginning of the year.
“For the next few months, we’re going to have a bit of peace, give some security to our jewelry stores,” said Cmmdr. Hanna. “But the thing is, we have to do something about the children that are being used.
“That’s our next step. We have to find some solution with our partner to give them a plan B because it’s not normal that our children, they go on social media and they’re being recruited.”
Correction: Montreal police previously stated 15 people had been arrested. It was actually 14.
