London became a global hub for phone theft. Now we know why

Reasons are overstretched police force and lucrative black market for European phones in China

- Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg

Sirens screamed as police vans pulled into a north London street, and shocked passersby paused to watch as officers charged into three secondhand phone shops.

"Do you have a safe on your premises, sir?" one officer asked a shopkeeper, who was sitting next to his computer and a half-drunk cup of tea.

The man watched as the officers combed through phones, cash and documents from two safes.

The raid, which The New York Times was invited to observe, was one of dozens carried out across the British capital in September, part of a belated, highly visible effort by London’s Metropolitan Police to tackle the phone theft problem that has plagued the city in recent years.

The scale of the crime has gone beyond the pick-pocketing familiar to London since before Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist made it famous.

Increasingly brazen thieves, often masked and on e-bikes, have become adept at snatching phones from residents and tourists. A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city in 2024, according to police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.

The September raids were aimed at identifying a group of middlemen who, police say, use second hand phone shops as part of a multilayered global criminal network. By the end of the two-week operation, detectives had found about 2,000 stolen phones and £200,000 (S$346,000) in cash.

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

ALUMINIUM FOIL APLENTY

For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash.