Early on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.
A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike - Akara gave chase, but they got away.
He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months. The prosecution rate for this offence is very low - the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.
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Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again - his prized possession was now on the other side of the world - in Shenzhen, China.
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It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen - where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.
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In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did. A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.
If it makes economic sense to break them down for parts and locking doesn’t stop it, I suppose that it might make sense to introduce security holes in phone cases, with a chain that links to a belt or similar.
Bonus – if you’re going to have a chain anyway, can maybe run a cable along it and have attached battery or other phone peripherals elsewhere on you that don’t add to phone weight.