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”.
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.
Go knock on the door of where the find my iphone shows up
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).
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.
So start going after the fencing network. Make it risky to hold a stolen phone.
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?).
Infinite budget? Bro, I know the exact location. Just go over there and knock on his door. Arrest the man and put him in jail for possession. One less thief out there taking advantage of the fact that the police doesn’t enforce the fucking laws.
They could, but they don’t.
Location isn’t that accurate, the phone was probably just traded in a car or in the street.
So the police get a call from the phone owner “yeah my phone location is on X street”, the police get down there, then what? Let’s say it was in a house, it’s rows of houses in London, do they knock on every door there and ask “hey have you stolen a phone?” in hopes the guy admits it? It could have been traded already so a description of someone might not be good enough.
I just read the whole article and it just re-iterates what I have just said. They recover a small amount of the phones because of how quick they move them after they have been stolen. It even says that the criminals “wrap stolen phones in tinfoil to block its signal”.
It’s easy to sit in your chair and say “just go over there and arrest them”, without even taking a moment to understand the logistics of tackling it.
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They could do their jobs. It’s not always easy but that’s what they signed up for.
They are doing their jobs. but with limited manpower they have chosen not to stretch themselves even thinner by physically chasing a phone. As the article says, they try to be smarter about it.