Apple, Samsung, And Google Are Given An Ultimatum By Police Chiefs

Britain’s largest police force has given an ultimatum to tech giants over the mobile phone theft epidemic.

Scotland Yard’s commissioner said Apple, Samsung and Google had until June to ‘design out’ thefts by installing a kill switch that would turn stolen phones into an ‘unusable brick.’ 

If the firms missed the deadline, Sir Mark Rowley said he would ask the Government to implement legislation forcing them to act. 

The commissioner has been in discussions with manufacturers for two-and-a-half years, but criticised the tech giants for being ‘polite but not serious.’ 

‘I’m setting a clear public marker, if by the first of June, industry has not come to the table in a genuinely serious and solution-focused way, with concrete commitments on stolen mobile phones… the Met will formally write to the Home Secretary to ask that she legislates,’ he told the International Mobile Phone Crime Conference in central London. 

Sir Mark, who referenced the Mail’s investigation into stolen phones being resold in Hong Kong at the event, said he could not understand why telecoms giants had not done more to protect their customers from theft.

‘For nearly three years we have sought meaningful engagement with phone manufacturers and their response to date does not match the scale of harm and risk to their customers,’ he added. 

The international trade in stolen phones is worth millions, with devices stolen in London worth more in countries such as China because it has none of the government restrictions put in place by the authorities. 

The Mail revealed last month that British children as young as 14 are being recruited on social media to steal mobile phones before school for £400 each.

Gangs shipping stolen phones to Algeria, China and Hong Kong use Snapchat to target children to swipe the devices – offering vast sums plus £100 bonuses to the most prolific phone snatchers. 

‘The exploitation of children in this trade is not just about individual offences,’ Sir Mark said. 

‘It’s an entry point into organised crime.

‘Children recruited to snatch phones for quick cash are being groomed into criminal networks, normalised into offending behaviour and pushed further into exploitation. 

‘What begins as one device on a street corner becomes a pathway into debt, coercion, violence and deeper criminality.’ 

The Met wants anti-theft protection switched on by default, stolen phones to be rendered unusable, and better access to IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) data to make it easier to return devices to their owners.

Figures released under Freedom of Information legislation show only a fraction of devices taken in London are returned to their owners. Between 2017 and February 27 2024, a total of 587,498 phones were stolen in London, excluding the City, 13,998 of which were recovered, and 573,500 were not.

The police undoubtedly cannot deal with this phone theft, or they just don’t see it as a priority. However, if phone theft stopped tomorrow, criminals would just move on to something else, such as laptops, wallets, watches, jewellery, and handbags, because organised theft will always redirect its targets.

However, if this is enforced, major mobile phone companies are not going to like this because when someone has their phone robbed, what is the first thing they do? Buy another one, so if a kill switch were put on mobile devices, these big companies would be out of pocket.

What we should be doing is putting a kill switch on these phone snatchers, and the only way to do that would be if our police actually worked for a living and did their job properly.