London has become a global hub for cell phone theft — and now we know why

LONDON — Sirens wailed as police cruisers arrived on a north London street, and frightened pedestrians stopped to watch as officers raided three second-hand cell phone stores.

“Do you have a safe in the establishment, sir?” a police officer asked a shopkeeper, who was sitting next to his computer and a half-drunk cup of tea.

The man watched as they searched cell phones, money and documents in two safes. The operation, which The New York Times was invited to attend, it was one of dozens held in the capital last month, part of a belated and highly visible effort by London’s Metropolitan Police to tackle the problem of mobile phone theft that has plagued the city in recent years.

Take your business to the next level with the country’s top entrepreneurs!

The scale of the crime surpassed the common thefts that London had known since before Charles Dickens made it famous in “Oliver Twist.” Increasingly bold thieves, often masked and on electric bicycles, have become skilled at snatching cellphones from locals and tourists. A record 80,000 cellphones were stolen in the city last year, according to police, giving London an unwanted reputation as Europe’s crime capital.

Last month’s operations aimed to identify a group of intermediaries who police say use second-hand cell phone stores as part of a multilayer global criminal network. At the end of the two-week operation, detectives found around 2,000 stolen cell phones and £200,000 in cash.

After years in which cellphone theft was a low priority for an overstretched police force, the new operations are revealing the curious combination of factors behind the epidemic, including severe cuts to British police budgets in the 2010s and a lucrative underground market for European cellphones in China.

A kilometer of aluminum foil

For years, London police believed that most cellphone thefts were the work of petty thieves looking for a quick buck. But in December, they received an intriguing tip from a woman who used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes destined for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries, but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.

“It soon became clear that this was no ordinary small-scale street crime,” said Mark Gavin, senior detective leading the investigation for the Metropolitan Police. “This was on an industrial scale.”

The discovery coincided with a broader effort by police to increase public trust by tackling the city’s most common crimes. Cellphone theft has been a source of particular outrage among victims, who for years reported their devices stolen and provided authorities with transmitted locations, only to receive a incident number and never hear anything again.

Now, police use this information to map where stolen cell phones are taken by street thieves. Following the seizure at Heathrow, a team of specialist investigators, who normally deal with weapons and drug trafficking, was assigned to the case. They identified other shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s suspected of being leaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen cell phones to China.

When the men were arrested on September 23, the car they were traveling in contained several cell phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil to try to stop them transmitting tracking signals. At one point, police said at a news conference, they observed the men purchasing nearly 1.5 miles of aluminum foil at Costco, a supermarket chain.

Some cell phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-global criminal business model,” police said, adding that in China, the newest devices can be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.

Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said it is easier to use stolen British cellphones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not adhere to an international blacklist that blocks devices reported stolen.

“This means that an iPhone stolen and locked in the UK can be used without any problems in China,” Wright said.

Electric bikes and balaclavas

The exporters are at the top of a three-tier criminal network, according to police. In between are shopkeepers and businesspeople who buy cell phones stolen from thieves and sell them to the public or pass them on for transport abroad. At the lowest level are thieves. Their numbers have increased along with attractive profits and a growing sense of impunity.

Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but mobile phone theft is disproportionately high, accounting for around 70% of thefts last year. And it grew quickly: The 80,000 cellphone thefts last year were a sharp increase from 64,000 in 2023, police told a parliamentary committee in June.

That’s partly because this crime is “very profitable” and “lower risk” than car theft or drug trafficking, Commander Andrew Featherstone, a police officer leading the effort against cellphone theft, said at a briefing. Thieves can earn up to £300 per device — more than triple the national minimum wage for a day’s work.

Many experts blame a specifically British problem: the impact of years of austerity imposed by Conservative governments in the 2010s, which led to cuts in police numbers and their budgets. In 2017, the Metropolitan Police said it would stop investigating low-level crimes where it judged there was little chance of catching the culprits, and instead prioritize serious violent and sexual crimes.

Emmeline Taylor, professor of criminology at City St. George’s, University of London, said in an interview that the police “have become more of a reactive force,” adding, “Low-level career criminals realized they were getting away with the crimes they were committing.”

Then, a technological advance arrived to make their work even easier: electric bicycles. Lime bikes, which can be rented and left anywhere, were launched in London in 2018. They have become extremely popular. Soon, electric bikes became the preferred escape vehicle for cell phone thieves.

Sergeant Matt Chantry, one of the leaders of last month’s operation, said in an interview that e-bike thieves are “a real problem.” They climb onto sidewalks and snatch cellphones from people’s hands at high speeds, he said, while making themselves “unidentifiable” by wearing balaclavas and hoods. “How do you monitor this?” he asked.

Police also hope that users will become more attentive to their personal safety. Even with smartphones becoming more advanced and valuable, people’s care for them has decreased. For the modern thief, a classic victim is a pedestrian walking close to the sidewalk, deeply absorbed by the content on their cell phone screen — a map, a message, a video.

“You wouldn’t count your money on the street,” said Lawrence Sherman, professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Cambridge. “But when your phone is worth £1,000, it’s like taking £1,000 out of your wallet and looking at it as you walk.”

c.2025 The New York Times Company