The Met has smashed an international stolen phone smuggling gang in the largest ever operation against mobile thieves in the capital.
Officers following a Find My iPhone tracker raided Heathrow Airport, where they uncovered another 1,000 stolen devices boxed up ready for a flight to Hong Kong.
The huge criminal network accused of organising the shipment is suspected of making millions after shipping 40,000 stolen phones from the UK to China in the past year.
They are alleged to be responsible for 40% of phones stolen in London with the West End the ‘epicentre’ of the thefts.
Under Operation EchoSteep, officers intercepted packages – marked up as containing batteries – after a victim’s Find my iPhone app tracked the device to Heathrow.
The thieves had failed to turn off all the devices and a ringtone blasting from a box confirmed the stolen stash.
Officers who would more typically be dispatched to seize weapons or drugs were drafted in because the scale of phone thefts has lured in organised crime gangs.
They make huge profits from mass-scale theft and sale of devices, most typically iPhones, overseas.
Some phones are also stripped down and the most valuable parts sold on.
Two Afghan nationals – nicknamed Seagull and Heron – by police have been charged in connection with the mobile phone stash recovered at Heathrow on Christmas Eve.
They are accused of being members of an organised crime group, handling stolen goods and money laundering.
They were allegedly running their operation from north London while the phones would typically be stolen by thieves on electric bikes further down the criminal chain who circle the West End to plunder phones.
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Police recovered 2,000 stolen devices at properties linked to the pair.
How much do phone snatching gangs make?
The snatching of mobile phones is just the start of a criminal enterprise that spans continents and makes tens of millions of pounds every year.
The often masked thief invariably circling the West End on a powerful electric bike on the hunt for iPhones grabs a device and flees off into the distance.
They may plunder a few more phones then deliver them to a handler at the next level of the network.
The thief will typically be paid up to £300 per device. So, technically from stealing the phone to dropping it off they can make the cash in half and hour.
Times that by, say, five phones robberies in a day, it’s a very lucrative shift.
The handler above them in the chain will be paid by a tier three organised crime member obviously giving them a tidy pay day too.
The criminal will then ship thousands of phones out of the UK every month.
The devices often find their way to China where an iPhone 16 can fetch $5,000.
The huge profits seen by criminal gangs are relatively low risk compared with smuggling drugs or weapons. The Met says that rival gangs rarely clash and the main threat of violence is at the point that the device is snatched. There is no evidence of gangs fighting over territory as such yet.
While the phones are possible to use overseas, the devices are always going to create profit for criminals. In North Africa there are fewer Apple retailers and the bandwidth used by mobile providers is the same as in the UK so the market there is rocketing, the Met said.
Sometimes the phones are even cannibalised for parts to refurbished devices. The police call these ‘Franken-Phones’.
What is clear is that until the likes of Apple make the phones unusable after they are stolen the demand for stolen phones will remain strong.
However, the Met are pushing the same resources into the problem more typically given for violent crime.
The elite Flying squad is in on the action and the Met is warning the phone snatchers plaguing the West End ‘we are coming for you’.
Commander Andrew Featherstone, who leads the Met’s team against phone theft crime, told Metro: ‘This is a message to these organised crime groups we are coming for you. We’ve broken up a damaging criminal network and we will not stop there.’
A total of 46 arrests have been made after the Heathrow raid revealed the extent of the criminal operation with tens of thousands of devices smuggled out of the UK every year.
Commander Featherstone added: ‘This is the largest crackdown on mobile phone theft and robbery in the UK in the most extraordinary series of operations of this kind the Met has ever undertaken. We’ve dismantled criminal networks at every level, from street-level thieves to international organised crime groups exporting tens of thousands of stolen devices each year.’
He said that Apple phones were the most sought-after devices the criminals made huge profits but the company had yet to agree to completely disable a device when it was stolen so as to make the theft futile.
He said: ‘We are talking to Apple. When a device is stolen directly from an Apple Store they can disable it. So the technology is there.’
Police say European phones are popular in China where users can access the internet without potential censorship by the government.
In North Africa, there are fewer Apple retail outlets so the stolen devices sell quickly there.
In one case uncovered by the crackdown, an Algerian man allegedly made more than 200 visits to the country from the UK in two years to sell on phones.
Other arrests included eleven detained by the Flying Squad on suspicion of plotting to steal iPhone 17s from a courier van.
Mayor Sadiq Khan said: ‘I want to thank the Met for responding to Londoners’ concerns leading to their biggest ever concerted campaign to tackle mobile phone crime.
‘This is, without doubt, the largest operation of its kind in UK history and it was humbling to see first hand how the Met are going after the leaders of international smuggling gangs as well as the robbers and street snatchers fuelling this industrial scale crime.’
Policing Minister Sarah Jones said: ‘I want to see more of these large scale interventions, which is why we are putting more police on the streets and arming them with stronger powers to track down the criminals responsible and make our streets safer.’
Met figures show a 13 per cent drop in theft and robbery in London so far this year.
DCI Mark Gavin said that treasured photographs had been recovered for phone theft victims under the operation.
He said: ‘Behind every one of those phones is a victim. People keep their lives on their phones and it can be heartbreaking when they are stolen. We heard from people who had last photographs of deceased relatives (on their phones).’
