The UK’s most senior police officer has accused tech giants including Apple and Google of “enabling” a phone theft epidemic that gangsters have turned into a “global criminal business”.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, disclosed that about a third of all activity by organised crime groups in London now revolves around stolen smartphones and other thefts. “They are making a fortune out of this,” he told The Sunday Times. “The organised crime business model is enabled by the reusability and resaleability of stolen phones.”
Rowley said the tech companies had allowed the trade in second-hand phones to proliferate by failing to introduce sufficient security measures to permanently disable devices. “I’m sure it’s inadvertent, but it’s enabling the criminal business models, which are leading to tens of millions of pounds being made out of this,” he said.
This is how it happens
When police officers in riot gear investigating a spate of phone thefts across London last year raided a council block in Notting Hill, they made an astonishing discovery.
Inside the flat used by Zakaria Senadjki, a 31-year-old Algerian citizen, they found row upon row of handsets tightly wrapped in aluminium foil in an effort to prevent them from being tracked.
There were 170 phones in total, as well as handwritten ledgers indicating that Senadjki and his accomplices had handled more than 5,000 stolen devices over an 18-month period.
Each entry in the ledgers showed the date a phone had been acquired, the model and its potential resale value. Police believe that many of the phones were later sold abroad. Senadjki and one of his associates, Ahmed Belhanafi, 25, bought designer clothes and took out substantial loans using some of the phones they stole as collateral — a spree thought to have amounted to £5.1 million.
Senadjki, Belhanafi and two other Algerian gang members living in London were jailed for a total of almost 19 years in November.
The raid last February gave investigators at Scotland Yard one of the most significant insights so far into the industrial scale of smartphone theft blighting London and other cities across Britain.
In 2023, more than 64,000 phones were reported stolen to the Met — double the number two years earlier. London had become the phone-snatching capital of Europe.
About 40 per cent of handsets were taken from just two council wards that cover the West End and parliament, to which tourists flock.
The trade in stolen phones, however, is no longer limited to young thieves looking to get their hands on some quick cash. Police believe it has become a highly professional and lucrative racket that is being exploited by major organised crime groups (OCGs) including gangs from Albania, Romania and north Africa.
The Met now estimates that at least a third of OCG activity in London revolves around “acquisitive” crime, such as phone theft, in addition to more traditional offences such as drug dealing and people trafficking.
“It’s a big percentage of organised crime activity now,” Rowley said. “Arresting the kids on the street who are stealing them is useful, but actually, if it’s driven by an organised crime business model, that’s not going to solve the problem.”
A second-hand iPhone can sell for up to £400, with Rowley noting that the “kids nicking them will be getting maybe £100, £200 a time, which is very lucrative”.
Police estimate the street value of devices stolen in London adds up to as much as £20 million a year, although the cost to the consumer to replace the devices could be around £50 million. “This is big money that is affecting real victims, insurance companies, tech companies — the whole system is affected by this.”
Rowley said that the bulk of the phones were exported and reused. A recent analysis by the Met of a sample of more than 3,500 stolen iPhones suggested that only 791 (22 per cent) remained in the UK, with the vast majority, 2,733 (78 per cent), reconnected to foreign networks in 111 countries.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, the phones aren’t reusable, the security is so great, the vast majority are used for parts’. That’s not true: the data we’ve got suggests the vast majority are reused,” he said.
Last year, a Sunday Times investigation revealed how stolen British phones were being shipped en masse to China, where they are being unlocked and resold, or dismantled for parts to be sold in markets or to recycling plants.
However, the Met’s analysis suggests that China is only the second-biggest hotspot for British phones. It is now Algeria, in north Africa, that is at the forefront of the burgeoning export market for stolen devices, with 770 of the tracked phones (22 per cent) reconnected to cloud-based services there.
Footsoldiers and handlers
The theft and distribution of stolen phones has some parallels with the county lines model of drug dealing, in which senior gang members rely on youngsters to sell their wares. “Organised crime will always follow the money,” noted Rowley.
In London, most devices are still snatched by perpetrators on foot or on cycles and electric bikes:
However, incidents of “steaming”, in which a large group of youths will seek to grab as many devices as possible from a phone shop, are on the rise.
Apple Stores across the capital, including the group’s flagship outlet on Regent Street, were targeted on 13 separate occasions over a two-and-a-half week period starting just before Christmas.
Twelve teenagers, including a 13-year-old boy, have been charged in connection with the crime spree to date.
In one raid captured on video, masked robbers stormed the Apple store at the Brent Cross shopping centre in north London and allegedly stole about 50 phones on display.
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Once acquired, stolen phones are normally taken to “handlers” who reward the footsoldiers in cash.
Police have identified two types of handler: those who stockpile devices at a residential address before they are moved on; and unscrupulous second-hand phone shop owners who might unlock and resell pilfered handsets, or act as a front for OCG activity.
The Met is working with the Mayor of London’s office to introduce by-laws that would allow officers, as well as Trading Standards, to carry out unannounced inspections at second-hand shops suspected of criminal involvement.
Delivery vans targeted
A more disturbing trend noted over the past few months has been robbers intercepting courier vans filled with scores of brand new smartphones.
In one incident last October, three men broke into a van and ran off with a number of packages while the driver had briefly stepped out to deliver a parcel in Newham, east London.
Detective Chief Inspector Laura Hillier said “significant resources”, including members of the Flying Squad, have been drafted in to tackle the phenomenon.
Gangs also appear to be conducting late-night raids on the back offices of mobile phone shops, where hundreds of handsets are stored. The Met is understood to be investigating a string of these break-ins.
Phones are not only being taken for their resale value. Criminals are also harvesting personal information from the devices and breaking into victims’ bank accounts.
Stolen cargo
Such is the demand for stolen smartphones abroad that gangs have been smuggling devices out of Britain in bulk on flights departing from Heathrow and Gatwick.
Police are aware of consignments of phones being loaded on to cargo planes at both airports. The devices are thought to have been concealed in Faraday boxes designed to block any signal that could allow them to be tracked.
There has also been at least one case in which phones were smuggled in a suitcase on to a passenger jet leaving Heathrow.
The revelations have prompted the Met to ask Border Force officials be on the lookout for stolen phones in the same way they would seek to identify hidden drugs or weapons.
Scotland Yard is separately seeking to enlist the support of the National Crime Agency (NCA), which is dedicated to tackling serious and organised crime. The NCA has a network of officers posted around the world, often based at British embassies, which could gather intelligence “upstream” on how gangs in foreign countries are able to sell and distribute phones snatched off UK streets.
Rowley said: “It’s law enforcement’s job to try and put a dent in the international organised crime that is driving this. But we cannot kill off the criminal business when there are such profits to be made. That’s where the technology companies come in.”
Building a kill switch
Rowley is now calling on the tech companies to introduce two short-term solutions that he argues will have a swift and “big effect” on the criminal trade.
Initially, he wants Apple and Google to automatically prevent stolen phones from being able to reconnect to cloud services, which he says would have a “suppressive effect” because it “disables so much of the use of the phone”.
He is calling on manufacturers to make each handset’s unique 15-digit international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number more accessible so that victims can easily report a theft, and buyers and police are able to check swiftly whether a device has been stolen.
In the longer term, he would like to see manufacturers, including Samsung, introduce the equivalent of a kill switch, which when flipped remotely would “digitally destroy” a stolen phone and prevent it from being reused anywhere in the world. Industry experts, however, believe such a drastic move could be problematic, because many phones that are reported missing or stolen are in fact later found by their owners.
Rowley used the example of car manufacturers “designing out crime” in the 1980s by making radios an integrated part of the dashboard console rather than a “removable commodity”.
“We need that degree of commitment here from the tech companies to break this current business model,” he said.
Next month Rowley will join Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, at a government conference on phone theft, which will be attended by many of the big tech companies.
“It’s up to the government whether they want to [drive change] through persuasion or regulation,” he said. “Ministers can legislate, so I would hope that the tech companies would pay attention and see what they can do.”
A Google spokesman said: “ Our top priority is the safety of users, and we are proud to bring constantly evolving, industry-leading security technologies to Android. Our freely available anti-theft features help users to protect their devices before, during and after a theft. Users in locations at risk of phone theft can simply switch them on and stay protected.”
Apple said it had introduced a range of additional security features, including facial recognition checks, to stop stolen devices being accessed by thieves.
Samsung said: “We are deeply committed to protecting the security and privacy of our users and offer an even more secure experience. We work very closely with authorities, including the mayor’s office, to help address the specific issue of phone theft in London. However, this issue is a collective responsibility for everyone to help solve, including device manufacturers.”
