Two-fifths of mobile phone thefts in Europe happen in UK, shows insurance data

London: An analysis of claims made to the American insurance company SquareTrade showed that 39% of all phone thefts across the company’s 12 European markets were in Britain. This was despite the UK only making up 10% of the company’s European customers.

The data revealed that phone theft claims in the UK had increased by 425% since June 2021 and 42% of phone thefts in the UK occurred in London. This equated to 16% of all phone thefts in Europe.

The data, reported by the Times, comes amid growing concern about phone snatching, with police saying gangs are now stealing handsets as an easier way to make money than drug dealing.

The Metropolitan police said about 80,000 phones were stolen in London last year, describing the phenomenon as an “organised criminal enterprise”. The stolen devices had a street value of about £20m, with iPhones being targeted most frequently.

James Conway, a Met police commander specialising in phone thefts, said phone theft had become more prevalent among gangs partly due to a growing demand for such gadgets in overseas markets, creating opportunities for “huge profitability”.

Conway said: “These are the same sort of gangs that are also running county lines operations and dealing [drugs] but are getting increasingly involved in robbery and theft … They can make a far greater profit than from dealing drugs in the same period of time with a lower risk from a criminal justice perspective.”

He added: “The sort of sentences you see for drug trafficking or drug dealing offences, and those you might receive for a series of thefts as a young person are very different.”

The police have called for phone companies to cut off cloud services on stolen phones in an effort to reduce their resale value. Representatives of Google and Apple told the House of Commons science and technology committee last month that security features were already in place to protect customer data.

Simon Wingrove, a software engineering manager at Google, said its system for such situations was “robust and works very well”.

Gary Davis, a senior director in regulatory and legal at Apple, said the company was concerned about the potential for fraud. He said there was a risk of bad actors attempting to obtain data and the power to delete accounts for blackmailing victims.

The Apple representative added the company had invested “many hundreds of millions” in designing protections for its customers against phone theft.