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A single location alert from an iPhone helped police catch a gang that's believed to have smuggled over 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China.
As BBC News reports, the crackdown began on Christmas Eve when a victim received a Find My alert that their stolen iPhone was in a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. When police arrived at the scene, they found the tracked iPhone in a box with 894 other phones—all of them stolen and bound for Hong Kong.
Police identified two Afghan men behind the operation; they were located with over 2,000 devices in their car and other properties. More than a dozen other individuals were later arrested as well.
"Finding the original shipment of phones was the starting point for an investigation that uncovered an international smuggling gang, which we believe could be responsible for exporting up to 40% of all the phones stolen in London," Detective Inspector Mark Gavin tells the BBC.
The number of phones stolen in London has gone from 28,609 in 2020 to 80,588 in 2024, and the recently arrested gang is believed to have been involved in 40,000 of those instances.
They were primarily targeting iPhones, as they offer a high-value proposition and come with an internet connection that helps bypass censorship in China, the report adds. The smugglers reportedly received £300 per iPhone.