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Title: London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why.

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/21/1557...

London police finally understand why 80,000 phones disappeared from the
city's streets last year. The answer involves budget cuts [non-paywalled
source] that hollowed out British policing in the 2010s, the arrival of
electric bikes that made theft easy, and a lucrative black market in China
where stolen British phones retain full functionality. The Metropolitan
Police discovered an industrial-scale operation in December when officers
traced a woman's iPhone to a Heathrow warehouse on Christmas Eve. Boxes
labeled as batteries and bound for Hong Kong contained almost 1,000 stolen
iPhones. The police arrested two men in their thirties in September as
suspected ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to
China. The epidemic took root after Conservative-led austerity measures
reduced police numbers and budgets. In 2017 the Metropolitan Police announced
it would stop investigating low-level crimes to focus resources on serious
violence and sexual offenses. Thieves on rented electric bikes began mounting
sidewalks to snatch phones at high speed while wearing balaclavas and hoods.
Police data shows only 495 people were charged out of 106,000 phones reported
stolen between March 2024 and February 2025. Thieves earn up to $401 per
device. The phones sell for up to $5,000 in China because Chinese network
providers do not subscribe to the international blacklist for stolen devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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