Early on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.
A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike - Akara gave chase, but they got away.
He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months. The prosecution rate for this offence is very low - the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.
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Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again - his prized possession was now on the other side of the world - in Shenzhen, China.
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It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen - where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.
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In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did. A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.
Who is to say it was at an address and not just sold/handed off in the street? They don’t just take the phones to a house and pile them up, they will be sold on through fences rapidly and if they can’t reset them to resell to someone, they get sold for parts (hence why this one ended up in China).
So start going after the fencing network. Make it risky to hold a stolen phone.
The phone isn’t going to end up in China from people passing them hand to hand; they’re going to be collected somewhere and bundled for shipping in an EM-protected covering of some sort. The record of the route they took right up until they go silent will be available for every phone. Looking at an aggregate map of this data should give the police a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
I suspect the difficulty is that the police need to get a data release from each individual involved and then get Google/Apple and/or the owners to voluntarily share the historical location data with the police… which most people aren’t willing to do out of an abundance of caution.