The Daily Populous Tuesday October 7th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by metro.co.uk and submitted by ahothabeth

After a year-long investigation officers disrupted a major criminal network suspected to have smuggled up to 40,000 stolen phones to China(Picture: Met Police)

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.

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A thief on a powerful e-Bike targets an unsuspecting Londoner, but it is just the first stage of the criminal operation (Picture: Met Police)

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.

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.’

Met officers uncovered 1,000 stolen phones bound for Hong Kong (Picture: Met Police)

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.

A stash of recovered phones wrapped in tin foil were bound for the streets of Hong Kong (Picture: Met Police)

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).’

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Tattycakes on October 6th, 2025 at 22:55 UTC »

I appreciate that they’ve made note of the human damage caused by these thefts, it’s not just money lost

> 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).’

Rosaly8 on October 6th, 2025 at 22:28 UTC »

This is amazing! My phone has been stolen in exactly the way described in the article by a thief on an e-bike. I immediately reported it and left information about my phone at the police, upset and expecting nothing. I was lucky however, because after a month I found an email in my spam box from the metropolitan police that they had recovered my phone and found it packed in tin foil with some other phones like in the picture in the article. It was sent back to me and I really appreciated the effort because odds of that happening were so low!

i_should_be_coding on October 6th, 2025 at 22:12 UTC »

I'm guessing the correct way of reading this is that one gang was responsible for 40% of the phone thefts in London, and not that 40% of London's residents had their phones stolen, yes?