The international trade in stolen phones is worth millions of dollars, with a device stolen in London worth more in countries such as China.
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The head of Britain’s biggest police force has thrown down the gauntlet to the phone industry to take action over stolen devices by June 1 or face being forced to do so by law.
Phone companies are leaving customers at risk until they take action to make stolen devices “unusable bricks”, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said.
He told delegates at the International Mobile Phone Crime Conference in central London that he does not understand why the telecoms giants have not done more.
He said that the Met will call on the Home Secretary to change laws to force phone companies to take action if necessary, and will encourage international law enforcement to do the same.
“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.”
The force wants to make resetting phones more difficult, with requirements for multi-factor authentication and time delays; moves to stop parts being sold without device matching serial numbers, and the ability to block devices globally in real time.
He added: “We will set out that 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.”
The international trade in stolen phones is worth millions of dollars, with a device stolen in London worth more in countries like China because it has none of the government restrictions put in place by authorities there.
In the UK, the Met has seen adverts on Snapchat offering children as much as £380 to steal a single iPhone, with a bonus of £100 for stealing 10.
Sir Mark told LBC he is "deeply, deeply frustrated" by the lack of action from tech companies.
He said: The solution to this lies with the tech companies, the people who design the phones, the people who build the operating systems.
"If your stolen phone became a brick when you reported it stolen, that was not reactivatable. That would kill the market.
"Without that, it's repurposable and sellable on the other side of the world for hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of pounds.
"It's creating hundreds of millions of criminal businesses, and we can put downward pressure on it, but the tech companies can break it.
"And I'm frustrated that we haven't moved after two and a half years of conversations."
Speaking of the impact it has on crime in London, Sir Mark said: “The exploitation of children in this trade is not just about individual offences.
“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 587,498 phones were stolen in London, excluding the City, 13,998 of which were recovered, and 573,500 were not.
Delegates from countries including Japan, Brazil, Spain, and the United States attended the conference, the first of its kind.
Sir Mark said weak security means criminals can still bypass locks, alter IMEIs, and sell parts that are not cryptographically tied to devices.
He said there would be no criminal market if a stolen phone were unusable, and called for similar action to that taken by the car industry to make car radios less attractive to steal.
“Phone manufacturing software companies have invested massively in preventing access to your data.
“It’s an escalating war with fraudsters and cyber criminals, but they’ve been successful enough to allow us to run our lives, including our finances, on our phones.
“Whilst they’ve worked hard on the financial and data security of our phones, they spend far less attention on the physical safety of their customers who walk through cities with a £1,000 or £2,000 device held loosely in their hands.
“If a stolen phone were to become an unusable brick and the parts were not recyclable, there would be no criminal market.”
London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan spoke to LBC about the importance of tackling phone theft.
He said: "When you speak to somebody who's had their phone, suddenly it's incredibly distressing.
"All your personal details are there, your photographs, your contacts, messages and so forth.
"And so we've made really good progress in reducing the number of phones stolen in London. 10,000 fewer phone thefts in London."
He added: "We're imploring the phone manufacturers, the mobile phone operators, the tech industry to work with us to do simple things to make a stolen phone useless at the moment.
"You can reset a phone, you can reuse a phone, and you can resell it.
"Why not have a kill switch so a phone that's stolen can't be used again? Why not have visible serial numbers so we know we can check the serial number and see if it's been stolen?
"And so there are things we've asked the companies to do. We're hoping they step forward and do it."
Last month, the Met said that the number of recorded phone thefts in London went from 81,365 in 2024 to 71,391 last year.
Separate figures available on the Met’s crime data website show that in 2023, there were 52,820 thefts from the person where a phone was taken, and 14,326 robberies; the figures for 2024 were 70,249 thefts and 11,125 robberies; and for 2025 61,292 thefts and 10,207 robberies.
In the space of the month to mid-February, the Met arrested 248 people over phone theft and recovered around 770 stolen handsets.
The force is using high-powered e-bikes and drones as part of its operations to stop phone theft.