London cops unplug iPhone crime ring said to nick 40% of city's mobiles London's Metropolitan Police says it dismantled an iPhone-robbing gang responsible for what's thought to be nearly half of all phone thefts in England's capital. It said that on September 23, two men in their thirties were arrested in North East London on suspicion of handling stolen goods, and were later charged and remanded …
Apprently crims are moving away from drug dealing into this because it's less risk and more profitable.
I wish I'd have known how much phones were going for in Hong Kong though, I'd have sold mine when there and got a new one when I got home!
More needs to be done by the manufacturers to block phones once notified of been stolen, but of course they have no reason to do that. Every stolen phone that gets activiated is another user in their ecosystem.
Activation lock is automatically enabled when you turn on "find my" on your iPhone, but that's not the default - because Find My sends your location information to Apple which has privacy implications so no one would suggest it should be the default.
If you have Find My enabled you can brick your phone by reporting it as "lost". Without it I'm sure there is a good way to do this. Maybe they could allow marking it as "lost" without Find My, unless there's some technical reason I'm overlooking why that would be an issue. You definitely don't want to have the police be able to do this, or they would have the power to brick your phone anytime they wanted. Imagine being able to tamp down a protest against a government by bricking the phone of everyone in the radius of that protest!
It doesn't benefit manufacturers to have phones more easily stolen. The demand for iPhones is fixed - if I acquire a stolen iPhone then I won't need to buy one so it costs Apple a sale from me, the person who had their phone stolen has to buy another, so the number of iPhones Apple sells is the same. Yes maybe I would have bought a second hand phone but maybe that's what the victim does, in the end it doesn't increase their sales or their installed base.
Ironically what you are asking for (better blocking of stolen phones) WOULD be beneficial to manufacturers because then if an iPhone is stolen and is remotely bricked (like would happen if someone stole mine) then it is useful only for parts - and if re-use of parts from stolen phones is also blocked then it is worthless. But Apple would sell another phone because the victim still needs his replaced and the thief would end up tossing it in the dumpster when he realizes it has Activation Lock enabled.
Maybe Apple needs to encourage people to enable Find My more strongly or something.
Knowing where your lost/stolen phone is isn't the same thing as being able to brick/disable your lost/stolen phone.
I was suggesting that perhaps Apple could allow phone owners to put their phone in "lost mode" without "find my" being enabled. I don't think you'd need to know where it is for that to happen - just treat it like a push notification, or have it happen the next time the phone contacts Apple's servers for any reason like checking if there are app updates. But like I said maybe there are some issues I'm overlooking that would make that problematic.
And Apple can (and does, at least to some extent) address that by tying all the "valuable" parts together. The gotcha is you WANT that if your phone is stolen - by default you want it to be completely worthless to a thief, so any component that has any sort of chip in it refuses to work when installed in another phone. But for repairability you DON'T want that.
So you want to have a way of overcoming that default "parts locked" state, to break all the links between parts to allow your phone to receive new parts or it to become a parts donor. That could be accomplished in the same way as putting it in lost mode - a state you set for your phone via Cloud thanks its being associated with your Apple ID. When you sell/trade your phone you remove it from your Apple ID, so it is up to the new owner to put it into "unlock parts" mode if they want.
The usual technical competence from the Beeb then.
The handset makes no difference - it's the overseas SIM (and associated home routing of traffic) that allows bypass of local content controls.
That'll be disconnected long before the device reaches a new user.
Put a local SIM in your 2nd hand iPhone and you're back to routing from behind the great firewall.
So what if you don't have a SIM at all, and just use it via wifi as an internet access device?
Or more to the point, what happens if I travel to China and bring my iPhone, and I access the internet via wifi? Either the firewall is blocking me, or it figures out somehow that I'm a tourist and it lets me bypass the Great Firewall.
Option 1. That is unless you're on a network that has been set up for tourist access, but usually they aren't making too many of those. I don't think there's much censorship circumvention capacity in stolen phones. I can't explain how the quoted prices could be real with anything I'm aware of.
“We're calling on phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung to do more to support us and protect their customers – especially around phone security and reuse.”
And yet the article glaringly fails to mention that the intercepted package was found because an owner of one of the purloined iPhones had Find My enabled on the device, and was able to direct police to its location.
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