Cell phone theft is seen by criminals as easy pickings for high rewards. Phones today can be worth up to £1,000 each.
I ride my bike to work and everywhere you go there are people standing on the side of the road waiting to cross with their heads in their phones. I could steal five to ten phones just on my way to work. That would be thousands of pounds of stolen goods in the hands of criminals.
They can reach speeds of 50mph on illegal e-bikes and have picked up their phone and left before people even knew it.
We’re all guilty of having our heads in our phones, but we all should be they could walk freely and safely without worrying about it.
At the City of London Police, we are fortunate to have a proactive team that focuses exclusively on property crime such as theft. The team does simple, old-school coppering, going out there to scrape bad guys.
A large part of our work now comes from phones stolen on the street and in bars and restaurants. Unfortunately, this is happening day in and day out in the City, in London and across the UK.
Victims can often track the location of their stolen phones using tracking apps like Find My. We get many messages from victims who say they know exactly where their phone is.
We understand that this is frustrating for victims who want us to show up and break down the door because their phone is ringing at an address. But it’s not that simple.
Sonny Stringer went on a rampage through London in March, stealing 24 phones in one morning
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES COWEN
We will try – and we will – to arrest the thieves and recover people’s phones when they can be traced to the property.
Not all addresses are worth sending officers to. The last known location may be a church, pub or public building before going offline and moving to a home address. The address the phone was last tracked to may be several days old and has probably been moved again by then.
A lot of thieves don’t even live locally, so we have to decide if we have the resources to have our officers drive an hour and a half to see when things like a well are happening in town.
We try to send at least four officers to each address because they are often not nice people. They are often involved in other types of serious organized crime and you don’t want to be outnumbered. When participating we sometimes find other stolen property, drugs, large amounts of cash and weapons including large zombie style knives.
Another concern is the accuracy of phone tracking software. The Find My app may show that the iPhone is in a block of flats, but it won’t show you anything on the vertical axis, and the building might be ten stories tall. So we have to decide whether to knock on every apartment in the block.
Police list of phones stolen by Stringer, below
Sometimes we can narrow down the correct address using other intelligence – for example, if a known phone thief lives there.
Once we visited a block of flats where the phone rang and the officers noticed that the shirt the suspect was wearing in the CCTV footage was hanging in the window. Officers found the suspect inside, detained him and recovered the stolen phone. We are not always so lucky.
In another case, the victim placed a tracking device on his bike that played a sound when it was stolen to locate him. We had constables lined up by mailboxes listening to find out which apartment it was in. Once we narrowed it down, we found the suspect hiding inside. They were arrested and the bike was recovered.
If a suspect refuses to let us in to search the property when we knock on their door, we need to consider the powers available to us. We may have enough to force entry now and then. In other circumstances we may have to return with a warrant obtained from the Magistrates’ Court.
To get a search warrant, the court must make sure the phone is there and not in the apartment upstairs or next door. We cannot be wrong and we must be sure that we are going to the right premises. We don’t want a situation where we end up at the address of an innocent person, no matter how sincere our intentions.
Alternatively, there are powers to enter and search property without a warrant under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. However, to use this power we would have to make an arrest and have reasonable grounds to believe that the suspect was inside the premises. .
So we get to those addresses, but we can’t do every single one. After all, we deploy officers whenever possible and get great results.
When we see phone thieves, our team, bike team or police unit will deploy wherever possible.
In March, we chased phone thief Sonny Stringer, 28, and the advanced police driver made “tactical contact” with the back wheel of his e-bike to stop him. He was about to climb onto the sidewalk where a woman was pushing a stroller [neither the mother nor the baby were hurt].
This tactic is rare, but we have it. This month he pleaded guilty to stealing 24 phones in one morning.
We managed to track down the owners of about half of the phones we restore. I recommend that everyone put their emergency contact phone number in the medical ID section of their phone [in the health app] so we can see it even if the phone is locked and return it to you.
It’s a great feeling when you can call the victim and let them know that someone has been arrested and you can return the phone to them.
We once returned 75 phones in a single day after an operation uncovered hundreds of phones. Some people cried and hugged us. That was a good day.
Inspector Dan Green is head of the London Police’s Proactive Acquisition Crime Team
How to protect your phone from theft
Most victims of phone theft never see their phone again, with only 2 percent of stolen phones being recovered by some law enforcement agencies.
Here are some tips to protect yourself and what you can do if your phone is stolen.
Prevention
• Dial *#06# to find your phone’s unique IMEI (Mobile Station International Equipment Identity). Make a note of it so that you can pass it on to your network provider if your phone is stolen. The network may block it and disable it for future use.
• Your phone will have a “find my phone” feature. Turn this on so you can sign in to your phone account from another device and see where it’s being used.
• If you’re using Face ID, make sure you’ve memorized your phone account password, as you’ll need it to block your account if it’s stolen.
• Add the relative’s number to the medical ID in your phone’s health app. This will make it easier for the police to get your phone back. Keep in mind that thieves can use this number to trick you into unlocking your phone. Ignore these texts.
• Do not stand near the curb with your phone in hand.
After the theft
• If your phone is stolen, sign in to 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 getting to it. Call your network and have your SIM blocked.
• You can then change the PIN and password on your phone account and suspend all cards in your phone wallet.
• You can also reset your phone to factory settings and erase all personal data. However, you may not want to do this right away, as some insurance policies require you to leave the find my phone feature on your phone until the claim is fully processed.