London mobil phone theft

This is a small step you can take that -- might -- help in recovery. As someone in the article mentioned they found their phone via Apple's Find My Phone feature. Normal a thief if they grab an active phone will shift to airplane mode to deactivate the find feature. You can kill that feature and should do so when travel. You don't need it. Go to Settings, Face ID & Passcode, then find Allow Access When Locked, and turn it off -- Gray. You might have a chance to continue to track your phone but it will be fairly useless to them till it can be totally reset. BUT --- not a cure for just been careless. Stay alert !!!

PS This is for Apple phones. Forgot there were others but think all have similar features.

Normal a thief if they grab an active phone will shift to airplane mode to deactivate the find feature.

Normally a thief (here in London anyway) will fashion a makeshift Faraday cage from wrapping the phone in cloth then aluminium foil. No signal at all gets out then. That's why the article references someone buying 1.5 miles of foil.

Find my phone isn't a lot of use in the London phone snatching scenario. Police won't follow up on a hit if there is one. If the phone ends up in a block of apartments it's pretty much impossible to find in a vertical orientation. As far as I understand it, the first sign of your phone will often be when it pops up in China or some other far off land.

What I find odd about all this is there's a demand in China, or anywhere, for used phones. Is there any consumer product more ubiquitous, more common, more universally available at the moment than a cell phone? Even an iPhone. They are cheap as chips as the Brits would say.

Maybe China has a high tariff on iPhones.

The article points out that there is no law in China forbidding shops from selling stolen phones (i.e. in fact there is no list of stolen phones that exists). So the phones are much more easily sold in China than in London or the EU or wherever - where as soon as the shop owner inputs the IMEI or whatever, it shows up on the list of stolen phones, so they are unable to sell it in their shop.

It's in the article, which is absolutely fascinating.

The phones are also sold in North African countries where there is no official Apple distribution. The phones are repackaged to look like legitimate second had items. I’m sure this happens in China as well. Customers may have no idea they are buying a stolen phone.