Budget cuts diverted attention from ‘minor crimes’, stolen phones exported to China, Algeria, 2,000 stolen phones in 2 weeks, 200,000 pounds cash recovered, and London police
Staff reporter,Daily Dawn, Dawn TV report
London: London has become a global hub for mobile phone theft. About 80,000 mobile phones were stolen in the British capital last year, and now the police are finally finding out where most of these phones went.
According to a New York Times report, when London’s Metropolitan Police vehicles entered a street in north London, passersby were surprised; they saw officers raiding three second-hand phone shops.
An officer asked the shopkeeper if he had a safe. The shopkeeper was sitting with half a cup of tea in front of his computer.
The man watched as police searched two safes for phones, cash and documents.
The raid, reported by The New York Times, was one of dozens of raids across the British capital last month, a significant and belated effort by London’s Metropolitan Police to tackle a problem of mobile phone theft that has been escalating in the city in recent years.
The crime has grown beyond the traditional pickpocketing that has been popular in London for centuries, even immortalised in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
Now, daring thieves, wearing masks and riding e-bikes, have become experts at snatching phones from residents and tourists.
A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year, according to police, making London the notorious capital of crime in Europe.
Last month’s raids were aimed at exposing a group of middlemen who police say are using second-hand phone shops as part of a multi-level international criminal network.
By the end of the two-week operation, investigators had recovered nearly 2,000 stolen phones and £200,000 in cash.
For years, phone theft was not a priority for a busy and under-resourced police force, but the new operations have revealed several surprising factors behind the epidemic, including significant cuts to police budgets in the 2010s and a lucrative black market in China for European phones.
For years, London police believed that most phone thieves were petty criminals looking to make a quick buck, but a woman’s tip-off last December changed that.
The woman used Find My iPhone to track her phone, which had reached a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. When police arrived there on Christmas Eve, they found boxes that were bound for Hong Kong. They were labelled ‘batteries’ but contained around 1,000 stolen iPhones.
Senior Metropolitan Police officer Mark Gavin said it was clear immediately that this was not ordinary street crime, but was happening on an industrial scale.
The breakthrough comes as part of a wider police campaign aimed at restoring public trust and tackling crime. For years, victims have been giving police the location of their stolen phones, but they have only been given a crime reference number, and then no action has been taken.
Police are now using this data to map the routes of stolen phones.
After the Heathrow seizure, the case was handed over to a team that normally investigates arms and drug smuggling, who seized further shipments and identified two men, both in their 30s, from forensic evidence, who were suspected of leading a gang that had shipped up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.
When the men were arrested on September 23, several phones were found in their car, some wrapped in aluminium foil to block tracing signals.
Police said they had at one point bought a mile-and-a-half of the foil from Casco.
Some phones are resold in the UK, but most are sent to China and Algeria, a ‘local-to-global’ criminal business model, police say, and new phones can cost up to $5,000 in China, making huge profits for criminals.
According to Oxford University cybersecurity expert Jos Wright, it is easy to use British phones in China because most networks there are not included in the international blacklist system.
He said this means that an iPhone blocked in the UK can be used in China without any problems.
E-bikes are the favorite ride of mobile snatchers
According to the police, the network consists of three levels: at the top are smugglers, in the middle are shopkeepers who buy and resell stolen phones, and at the bottom are street thieves who go out to snatch phones every day.
General crime has decreased in London, but the rate of phone theft is still very high.
Mobile phone theft accounted for almost 70% of all thefts last year, and it is growing rapidly, according to the police, 80 phones were stolen or snatched 2024, compared to 64,000 in 2023.
Commander Andrew Featherston said the crime was also on the rise because it was highly profitable and less dangerous, with a thief earning up to £300 from a single phone, more than three times the minimum wage.
According to experts, a major reason for the crisis is Britain’s austerity policies, which saw police budgets slashed in the 2010s.
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