LONDON: About 80,000 phones were stolen in the British capital last year, and the police are discovering where many of them went, reports The New York Times.
Sirens screamed as police vans pulled into a north London street, and shocked passers-by paused to watch as officers charged into three secondhand phone shops. “Do you have a safe on your premises, sir?” one officer asked a shopkeeper, who was sitting next to his computer and a half-drunk cup of tea.
The man watched as they combed through phones, cash and documents from two safes. The raid, which The New York Times was invited to observe, was one of dozens carried out across the capital last month, part of a belated, highly visible effort by London’s Metropolitan Police to tackle the phone theft problem that has plagued the city in recent years.
The scale of the crime has gone beyond the pick-pocketing familiar to London since before Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist made it famous. Increasingly brazen thieves, often masked and on e-bikes, have become adept at snatching phones from residents and tourists. A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year, according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.
Last month’s raids were aimed at identifying a group of middlemen who, the police say, use secondhand phone shops as part of a multilayered global criminal network. By the end of the two-week operation, detectives had found about 2,000 stolen phones and 200,000 pounds (Rs75,559,899.65) in cash.
For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.
“It quickly became apparent this wasn’t just normal low-level street crime,” said Mark Gavin, a senior detective leading the investigation for the Metropolitan Police. “This was on an industrial scale.”
The breakthrough coincided with a broader push by the police to increase public confidence by tackling the city’s most common crimes. Phone theft has been the subject of particular anger among victims, who for years reported their cellphones stolen and handed the police the locations being transmitted, only to be given a crime reference number and hear nothing more.
The police are now using that information to map where stolen phones are transported by street thieves. After the Heathrow seizure, a team of specialist investigators who normally deal with firearms and drug smuggling was assigned to the case. They identified further shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s who are suspected of being ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.
When the men were arrested on Sept. 23, the car they were traveling in contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals. At one point, the police said at a news conference, they observed the men buying almost 1.5 miles’ worth of foil in Costco.
Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-to-global criminal business model,” the police said, adding that in China, the newest phones could be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.
Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said it is easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not subscribe to an international blacklist that bars devices that have been reported stolen. “That means a stolen iPhone that has been blocked in the UK can be used without any problems in China,” Mr. Wright said.
