What happens to the thousands of mobile phones stolen in the US and Europe? Many can be traced to just one building in China, so we paid them a visit

Mobile phone theft is at an all time high, with the major capital cities in the West struggling to tackle what is now agreed to be an epidemic. 

In the UK, the latest data reveals that almost 231,000 phone thefts and robberies were recorded over the past four years in the capital. London has the highest instance of stolen devices among European cities, however, Madrid has a higher per capita phone crime rate, and other European cities follow closely behind.

Most thefts are committed by highly organised gangs, often on electric bikes, who orchestrate a quick snatch theft out of unsuspecting pedestrians hands, disappearing at speed before they have even realised what has happened. 

The situation has escalated because the path to selling stolen mobiles or their lucrative spare parts on the overseas black market appears to be open, with some estimates that the trade is worth more than £50 million a year in London alone. The full cost though is not just financial, the stress and inconvenience of losing our portable computers, which are a lifeline to accessing banking, education, social and work lives cannot be quantified.

To identify how stolen devices are exiting the country to reach the black market traders, the Metropolitan Police provided phone IMEI serial numbers from over 4,000 devices stolen last year to the major manufacturers. Around 80% of the stolen devices were reconnected using overseas IP addresses with Algeria and China the prime locations identified.

The Chinese city of Shenzhen, known as the Silicon Valley of China given its role as a global centre for hardware manufacturing, has been identified as the largest hub for the stolen iPhone trade. The four storey Feiyang Times building on the city’s Huaqiangbei electronic commercial street is known as the ‘stolen iPhone building’, thanks to the number of devices that have been tracked to its location. Renowned for selling cheap, second hand mobile devices from Western countries, this hub is where many devices end up, with readily available buyers and traders for every model and every component of devices displayed across the various market stalls.

Our CEO, Dion Price, recently visited the Feiyang Times building to witness first hand where thousands of stolen mobiles end up every day, where traders haggle over devices in various locked and unlocked states, to be sold on or stripped for parts.

Dion recently provided testimony as an expert witness to the Parliamentary Committee for Science, Innovation and Technology on the growing problem of mobile phone theft in the UK.

He explained how we can use a system like the Trustonic Telecoms Platform to design out mobile phone theft. Its sole purpose is to solve smartphone fraud, theft and delinquency problems for over 70 mobile phone operator, retailer and financier customers in 35 countries around the world today.

We do this by capturing all of the unique smartphone identifiers (IMEI numbers) into one central system across a range of handset manufacturers and a multitude of locking technologies.

All devices are injected into the Trustonic system as they arrive in the country. Each phone is now ready to lock as and when required.

Customers and end consumers do not have to proactively turn any safety features on, no permission acceptance, no fiddling with settings. Security is on by default out of the box. No opt in required. It just works.

This exact same system can be used on an international level to remove the very incentive for theft. If devices can be locked remotely to make them worthless on the black market, the incentive for stealing them evaporates.

As he points out during the committee session, why are we still making it a problem for the end user to fix, with current consumer phone theft protection made up of layers of opt in, opt out, preferences and operating system settings.

The car industry sorted that issue out years ago. You don’t “opt in” to your car immobiliser, let’s help the mobile industry to follow its example.