By Rob Harris
London: Jason George was sitting in a pub in Holborn, in central London, enjoying an after-work pint when a woman approached him and held a piece of paper over the table with a plea for money scribbled on it.
Soon after politely declining her request, the Tasmanian, who moved to the UK in November 2021, noticed both his work and personal mobile iPhones, which had been on the table, had vanished along with the woman.
A thief steals a mobile phone from a man walking down a London street.Credit: City of London Police
This is par for the course in modern London, where new Metropolitan Police data has revealed that a phone is reported stolen every six minutes. The latest figures, obtained by the BBC last week, showed 91,000 reports of phone theft last year – an average of 248 a day.
Late last year Stephanie Dale, who left Sydney for Britain in July, was left shaken when her phone was plucked from her hands by a cyclist while she waited for a bus in Herne Hill, south London. Just last week Daniel Harness, a merchant banker who moved to London in January, was texting a friend after jumping off the Tube when his phone was taken from his hands near Old Street Station. Lauren Fisher’s phone was stolen from her bag by a stranger while she sat, 39 weeks pregnant, outside a pub at London Bridge.
“Guess he thought I wouldn’t be able to chase after him,” she says.
In January alone in Greater London there were more than 8500 reports of stolen phones, with only 119 returned to their owners. Overall, just 2 per cent of reported thefts last year ended with the recovery of a device.
Only 2 per cent of stolen phones were recovered last year.Credit: Getty Images
Criminals use bikes and mopeds when they snatch phones, and often victims are approached from behind while talking on their phone or texting. Police say 54 per cent of phone snatches – known in some quarters as “Apple picking” – involve thieves using pedal bikes.
They often mount the pavement to grab the phone or snatch it from the road. Sometimes when a moped is used, a pillion passenger will snatch it. Thieves target busy streets, transport hubs and licensed premises.
Sometimes the incidents become violent. One City broker recently intervened in a robbery and was left needing 52 stitches to his face. In another incident, robbers pulled open the doors of an Uber at 4am in the West End before beating a man until he handed over his iPhone.
His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Andy Cooke, who acts as an independent inspector of police forces, told the BBC the charge rate for phone theft was “unacceptable and unsustainable”.
Jason George’s mobile phones were traced, and both had been taken out of the UK soon after their theft.
“Phone theft is not a minor crime. It strikes at the heart of how safe people feel in their own communities,” he said. “There needs to be a concerted drive to address this because it directly affects the public’s confidence in the police’s ability to keep them safe.”
But while police say it’s important victims contact them as soon as a robbery occurs – the “Golden Hour” after a robbery is critical to catching the culprits – most victims are told there isn’t much police can do.
“You don’t realise how dependent you are on your phone until you lose it,” Jason George says.
After losing two of his almost brand-new iPhone 13s, he logged in to lock the settings but was still able to track their location.
“They went to Amsterdam overnight, then to Dubai a few days later, then ended up in Shenzhen in China,” he said. “They didn’t move after that.”
He said police asked him to fill in an online form to get a case number, so he could lodge an insurance claim and get a new phone.
“They said they would have no chance of finding them, so they didn’t do any investigations despite my having the exact address details of their whereabouts,” he said.
Scotland Yard says when a mobile phone is stolen, perpetrators will look to sell the device quickly for cash — often to buy drugs — before it can be traced. Skilled thieves can reprogram a handset and swap its SIM card in minutes. Resellers will gladly pay hundreds of pounds for the latest iPhone 13 or 14s which retail for about £1000.
Gangs have been caught sending handsets overseas, where they can be broken down, reconstituted and sold on. Others will seek to crack the phone’s security to steal personal data and commit fraud, feeding a huge black market for such information, often greater than the value of the handset.
Apple IDs, Amazon and financial accounts can be hacked to make large purchases. More sinister offenders will seek to use photos, texts or emails to blackmail the original owner.
Georgia Haydon, who moved from Brisbane to London, was in a nightclub in January when a phone was plucked from her bag. She was later able to track it to an address in Finsbury.
“I filed a police report, and they did nothing,” she said. “I received a letter from them saying that they couldn’t help and then phoned them up saying: Look, I can see where my phone is... it looks like an off licence ... can you go and check it out?” She said police told her they could not force entry and no one was likely to admit to having a stolen phone. She later tracked the phone to Algeria.
Banker Daniel Harness said many London locals had told him phone theft was common and many businesses have signs outside warning that mobile thieves operate in the area.
“What also was a bit freaky was realising how much info is tied to my phone nowadays,” he said.
“I froze my bank accounts etc, but that all took a lot of calls to a lot of people to get done because the device that it’s all linked to was in the hands of someone else.”
The issue is now playing out in the political sphere ahead of a potential general election as early as this time next year. Policing Minister Chris Philp, a Londoner, said he was “deeply concerned” by the figures.
“It probably applies in other cities as well,” he said. “I think there’s more we can do to be absolutely honest.”
He said that as well as recruiting new officers he wanted bureaucratic burdens removed from the daily tasks of frontline policing.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council recently revealed that a review of productivity had found 443,000 officer hours were spent filling in forms and dealing with unnecessary administrative tasks, equivalent to attending 220,000 domestic abuse incidents or 270,000 burglaries.
“So that’s what I’m expecting from policing in return for the investment we’ve made,” Philip said.
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