London became a global hub for mobile phone theft – now we know why

“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 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 mobile phones stolen and handed 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 had sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.

When the men were arrested on September 23, the car in which they were travelling contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminium 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 more than 2400 metres of foil in Costco.

Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many were 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 $US5000 ($7680), generating huge profits for the criminals involved.

Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specialises in cybersecurity, said it was easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers did not subscribe to an international blacklist that barred devices that had been reported stolen.

“That means that a stolen iPhone that has been blocked in the UK can be used without any problems in China,” Wright said.

E-bikes and balaclavas

The exporters are at the top of a three-tier criminal network, police say. In the middle are the shopkeepers and entrepreneurs who buy stolen phones from thieves and sell them to unsuspecting members of the public or pass them on for transport abroad. On the lowest tier are the thieves. Their numbers have risen in line with the juicy profits on offer, and a growing sense of impunity.

Overall, crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70 per cent of thefts last year. And it has risen sharply: the 80,000 phone thefts last year were a stark increase from the 64,000 in 2023, the police told a parliamentary committee in June.

That is partly because this crime is both “very lucrative” and “lower risk” than car theft or drug dealing, the police officer leading the effort to tackle phone theft, Commander Andrew Featherstone, told a news conference. Thieves can make up to £300 a device – more than triple the national minimum wage for a day’s work.

And they know they are unlikely to be caught. Police data shows about 106,000 phones were reported stolen in London from March 2024 to February 2025. Only 495 people were charged or given a police caution, meaning they admitted to an offence.

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Of course, many other large cities, including New York, face phone theft. London police argue that varying crime-recording practices make it impossible to identify where in the world the problem is worst.

Many experts blame a specifically British issue: the impact of years of austerity imposed by Conservative-led governments in the 2010s, which led to cuts in the number of police officers and their budgets. In 2017, the Met said it would stop investigating low-level crimes where it judged there was little prospect of catching the culprits, so it could prioritise tackling serious violence and sexual offences.

Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City St George’s, University of London, said the police “became more of a reactive force … [and] low-level career criminals realised that they were getting away with the crimes they were committing”.

Then, a technological advance arrived that made their work even easier: electric bikes. Lime bikes, which can be rented and dropped off anywhere, launched in London in 2018. They exploded in popularity. Before long, e-bikes were the getaway vehicles of choice for phone thieves.

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Sergeant Matt Chantry, one of the leaders of the raid last month, said in an interview that thieves on e-bikes were “a real problem”. They mounted sidewalks and swiped phones from people’s hands at high speed, he said, while making themselves “unidentifiable” by wearing balaclavas and hoods. “How do you police that?” he asked.

Attempting to chase them on London’s sometimes gridlocked streets was “high risk”, he said, endangering pedestrians, other drivers and the offender. Ultimately, he said, the police had to ask, is the risk of a fatality worth it for a mobile phone?

Lost and found: 4000 iPhones

The raid on the three secondhand shops in north London last month paid off, with the police recovering £40,000 and five stolen phones. Those handsets will join about 4000 other stolen iPhones recovered by police since December, now held in a storeroom in Putney, south-west London, as officers try to contact their owners.

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In the longer term, Featherstone said, the police wanted to dismantle the criminal networks driving the illicit trade and “disincentivise criminals from wanting to steal phones” by making it clear they could be caught.

Police are also hoping users will become more savvy about their personal security. Even as smartphones have become more advanced and valuable, many people’s handling of them has become less protective. For the modern phone thief, a classic mark is a pedestrian walking close to the curb, deeply absorbed by the content on a cell screen – a map, a text, a video.

“You wouldn’t count your money on the street,” said Lawrence Sherman, an emeritus criminology professor at the University of Cambridge. “But when the phone is worth £1000, it’s like pulling £1000 out of your wallet and looking at it as you walk.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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