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”.
“Police could not help” Funny that
To be fair, what are they supposed to do? The phone will be handed off a bunch of times within hours of it being stolen. You are not getting your phone back unless the thieves are caught in the act.
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).
In a world of home surveillance, doorbell cameras, and phones with constant GPS that can tell you the exact location of where it’s at, the police are more useless than ever.
With infinite budget sure, worth a shot, but it would cost a lot more than the price of the phone to track it down.
Realistically speaking, there isn’t enough personel or funds, so it isn’t worth attempting to chase the phone down. These phones move fast through fences, they aren’t just taken to one address and left there. The criminals could and probably do have ‘faraday bags’ to block signals from phones as they move them, only ever taken out to sell them along.
All the police can do is record any data they do get and compile it into a larger investigation with the hopes of attacking the head of the snake (but what even is that?).
They could do their jobs. It’s not always easy but that’s what they signed up for.
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.
Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.
I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.
“Manufacturers and tech companies have a bigger role to play”
Yeah Apple is already making the parts junk with the locking but it doesn’t seem to help.
If it makes economic sense to break them down for parts and locking doesn’t stop it, I suppose that it might make sense to introduce security holes in phone cases, with a chain that links to a belt or similar.
Bonus – if you’re going to have a chain anyway, can maybe run a cable along it and have attached battery or other phone peripherals elsewhere on you that don’t add to phone weight.
I mean this isn’t surprising to anybody. plenty of luxury cars stolen over here to get shipped to the middle east
