Traitors star's home burgled 20 minutes after he shared holiday photos

A contestant from the second series of the BBC's The Traitors has revealed how his Cheshire family home was burgled while he was abroad, just minutes after he posted a picture of himself relaxing by a swimming pool with his wife Kate and their two young children.

Paul Gorton, originally from St Helens, said the couple had been on a family holiday when he shared the update on social media at 9:10pm BST. In the post, he described himself and Kate sitting by the side of the pool, the children already in bed and the family enjoying "our little bit of the holiday". Around 20 minutes later, he says, burglars forced their way into the property.

The Traitors, a long-running BBC reality competition in which contestants are secretly identified as traitors and eliminated from a social deduction game, propelled Gorton into the public eye after his appearance on the second series. That profile, he believes, may have made him a more attractive target — a possibility Cheshire Police have not ruled in or out.

What was taken included his bicycle and a number of items with sentimental value. Among them was a ring belonging to Kate's grandmother, which Gorton describes as irreplaceable because it cannot simply be replaced. The burglary took place on 28 August, several days before the family returned home to find the doors opened and the contents disturbed.

Investigators and security specialists often distinguish between opportunistic and targeted burglaries. Opportunistic burglars tend to work a street or an estate, trying several doors in a single night until they find one that yields. Gorton says Cheshire Police classed his case as a "one-off hit", telling him officers usually see offenders coming in from far and wide, picking off a handful of homes in a night. Because that was not the case here, he believes he was selected deliberately.

How the burglars entered, he said, was through the bi-fold doors at the back of the house. Photographs supplied to the BBC show a lock whose cylinder has been punched out, leaving a roughly circular hole. The technique is known as lock snapping, in which the barrel of the lock is broken in a way that allows the door or window to be opened without obvious signs of forced entry — which can make a break-in harder to detect and harder for insurers to challenge.

The thieves also went a step further, cutting the broadband connection before leaving. That detail has been read as a sign of deliberate concealment, since it would delay the household discovering the intrusion, though the article does not establish who was responsible or why the line was targeted.

Gorton's suspicion is that an acquaintance online, or at least someone who follows him, saw the post, worked out the family would be away, and then acted. "This makes me suspect that it could be someone that follows me," he said. "They've seen that I've posted that I was away and then thought 'let's go in the house and see if we can get ourselves some goodies'."

The case is not an isolated one. Police forces and consumer watchdogs across the UK have repeatedly warned that holiday and away-from-home posts can tip off offenders, because even apparently innocuous images can reveal a property, a neighbourhood, a length of absence or the presence of security equipment. Advice commonly offered is to post after returning home, to strip location data from photographs, to review privacy settings so posts are visible only to intended audiences, and to treat the whole picture of a home's defences rather than any single measure.

That broader point is one Gorton now emphasises. Having joined forces with the price comparison campaign group Compare the Market, he said security is "not just about social media". He now thinks about locks, alarms, external lighting, and what he is posting online — including whether an image accidentally advertises that nobody is home.

Compare the Market commissioned a licensed private investigator to examine the publicly available digital footprints of nine volunteers, testing how easily homes could be located online. The investigator was able to identify seven of the nine home addresses using publicly accessible information alone. The quickest address was traced in 15 minutes, with the first useful lead appearing after only 50 seconds.

The exercise, Gorton hopes, shows the value of learning from someone else's misfortune rather than suffering the same loss. His message, he said, is for people to be "a little bit smarter, more conscientious" about what they share, and to wait until they are back at home before posting. "Hopefully people can learn from my mistakes," he said, adding that if the theft leads others to protect themselves, at least something useful will have come of it.

Cheshire Police confirmed that investigations into the burglary were ongoing. No arrests have been made. The loss of the family ring in particular appears to weigh heavily: unlike a bicycle or a laptop, an heirloom left behind a grandmother carries a history that cannot be reinstated by any insurance payout, making the personal cost of the break-in difficult to quantify. Gorton is now using his own experience to argue that a few small changes to everyday online habits, combined with layered physical security, can remove many of the opportunities burglars rely on.