Stealing mobile phones is seen by criminals as easy prey for high rewards. Phones these days can be worth more than £1,000 each.
I cycle to work and wherever you go there are people standing on the side of the road, waiting to cross, with their heads buried in their phones. I could steal five to ten phones if I was alone on my way to work. That would equate to thousands of pounds of stolen goods in the hands of criminals.
They can reach 50 miles per hour on illegal electric bikes, and they’ve picked up the phone and left before people even realize it.
We’re all guilty of having our heads in our phones, but we all should be being able to walk around freely and safely, without having to worry about it.
At the City of London Police we are fortunate to have a proactive team, focusing exclusively on acquisitive crimes such as theft. The team does simple, old-fashioned copper work and goes out to steal bad guys.
A large part of our work now involves phones being stolen on the street and in bars and restaurants. Sadly, this happens day in and day out in the city, in London and across Britain.
Victims can often track the location of their stolen phones through tracking apps, such as Find My. We receive many reports from victims that they know exactly where their phone is.
We realize it is frustrating for victims who want us to come and break down the door because their phone is pinging at an address. But it’s not that simple.
Sonny Stringer toured London in March and stole 24 phones in one morning
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES COWEN
We will try to arrest the thieves and get people’s phones back as soon as they can be traced to a property.
Not all addresses are worth sending agents to. The last known location could be a church, a cafe or a public building before it goes offline and moves to a residential address. The address where the phone was last traced may be several days old. By then, chances are the phone has already been moved again.
Many of the thieves don’t live in the area either, so we have to decide if we have the resources to have our officers drive an hour and a half to look at it if something happens in town. Good.
We try to send at least four agents to each address, because they are often not nice people. They are often involved in other forms of serious organized crime, and you don’t want to be in the minority. When we attend, we sometimes find more stolen property, drugs, large amounts of cash and weapons, including large zombie-style knives.
Another issue is the accuracy of the phone tracking software. The Find My app might show that there is an iPhone in an apartment building, but you won’t see anything on the vertical axis and the building might have ten floors. So we have to decide whether to knock on every apartment in the block.
Below is a police release of the phones stolen by Stringer
Sometimes we can find out the correct address through other information, for example if a known telephone thief lives there.
We once visited an apartment building where a phone pinged and officers saw that the shirt the suspect was wearing was hanging in a window on CCTV footage. Officers found the suspect inside, arrested him and recovered the stolen phone. We are not always so lucky.
In another case, a victim had a tracking device placed on his bicycle that, when stolen, played a sound to locate the bicycle. There were officers queuing at the mailboxes to find out which flat it was in. Once we tracked it down, we found a suspect hiding inside. They were arrested and the bicycle was recovered.
If a suspect refuses to let us in to search the premises when we knock on his door, we must take into account the powers we have. Maybe we have enough to force entry there and then. In other circumstances we may have to return with a warrant obtained from a magistrates’ court.
To obtain a search warrant, the court must be satisfied that the phone is present and that it is not in the flat above or in the house next door. We cannot get this wrong, and we need to be sure we are entering the right premises. We don’t want a situation where we end up entering an innocent person’s home, no matter how honest our intentions are.
Alternatively, there are powers under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to enter and search premises without a warrant. But we would have to make an arrest to use this power and have reasonable grounds to believe the suspect was at the location. .
So we’re going to go to these addresses, but we can’t do them all individually. All that said, we deploy officers every time we can and get great results.
If we see phone thieves walking around, our team, the bicycle team or the road police unit are deployed where we can.
In March we chased a phone thief called Sonny Stringer, 28, and an experienced police driver made ‘tactical contact’ with the rear wheel of his electric bike to stop him. He was about to step onto the sidewalk where a woman was pushing a stroller [neither the mother nor the baby were hurt].
This tactic is rare, but we do have it at our disposal. This month he pleaded guilty to stealing 24 phones in one morning.
We have managed to identify the owners of approximately half of the recovered telephones. I recommend everyone put an emergency phone number in the medical ID section of their phone [in the health app] so that even if the phone is locked, we can see that and return it to you.
It’s a great feeling when you can call a victim and let them know that someone has been arrested and you can give them the phone back.
We once returned 75 phones in one day after an operation uncovered hundreds of phones. Some people cried and hugged us. That was a good day.
Inspector Dan Green is the head of the proactive acquisitive crime team at the City of London Police
How to protect your phone from theft
Most victims of phone theft will never see their phones again, with only 2 percent of stolen phones being recovered by some police forces.
Here are some tips on how to protect yourself and what to do if your phone is stolen.
Prevention
• Dial *#06# to find out your phone’s unique IMEI (international mobile station equipment identity). Make a note of it so that you can give it to your network provider if your phone is stolen. The network can block it and blacklist it for future use.
• Your phone has a “find my phone” function. Enable this so you can log into your phone account from another device to see where it is being used.
• If you use Face ID, make sure you have memorized your phone account password, as you will need it to lock your account if it is stolen.
• Add a family member’s number to the medical ID in your phone’s health app. This makes it easier for the police to return your phone to you. Keep in mind that thieves can use this number to trick you into unlocking your phone. Ignore these texts.
• Don’t stand near the curb with your phone in your hand.
After theft
• If your phone is stolen, log into your phone account (icloud.com/find or android.com/find) from another device as soon as possible and mark it as lost or stolen. This will lock the phone and prevent the thief from accessing it. Call your network to have the SIM card blocked.
• You can then change your phone account PIN and password and suspend cards in your phone wallet.
• You can also reset the phone to factory settings, which will erase all personal data. However, you may not want to do this right away as some insurance policies require the ‘Find My Phone’ feature to remain active on the phone until the claim has been fully processed.