London became a global hub for phone theft. Now we know why.

The man watched as they combed through phones, cash and documents from two safes. The raid, which The New York Times was invited to observe, was one of dozens carried out across the capital last month, part of a belated, highly visible effort by London’s Metropolitan Police to tackle the phone theft problem that has plagued the city in recent years.

The scale of the crime has gone beyond the pick-pocketing familiar to London since before Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist made it famous. Increasingly brazen thieves, often masked and on e-bikes, have become adept at snatching phones from residents and tourists. A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year, according to police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.

Last month’s raids were aimed at identifying a group of middlemen who, police say, use secondhand phone shops as part of a multilayered global criminal network. By the end of the two-week operation, detectives had found about 2,000 stolen phones and 200,000 pounds ($266,000) in cash.

After years in which phone theft was a low priority for an overstretched police force, the new operations are revealing the curious blend of factors behind the epidemic, including steep cuts to British police budgets in the 2010s and a lucrative black market for European cellphones in China.

A Mile of Aluminum Foil

For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But in December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.

“It quickly became apparent this wasn’t just normal low-level street crime,” said Mark Gavin, a senior detective leading the investigation for the Metropolitan Police. “This was on an industrial scale.”

The breakthrough coincided with a broader push by police to increase public confidence by tackling the city’s most common crimes. Phone theft has been the subject of particular anger among victims, who for years reported their cellphones stolen and handed police the locations being transmitted, only to be given a crime reference number and hear nothing more.

The police are now using that information to map where stolen phones are transported by street thieves. After the Heathrow seizure, a team of specialist investigators who normally deal with firearms and drug smuggling was assigned to the case. They identified further shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s who are suspected of being ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.

When the men were arrested Sept. 23, the car they were traveling in contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals. At one point, the police said at a news conference, they observed the men buying almost 1.5 miles’ worth of foil in Costco.

Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-to-global criminal business model,” the police said, adding that in China, the newest phones could be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.

Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said that it is easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not subscribe to an international blacklist that bars devices that have been reported stolen.

“That means that a stolen iPhone that has been blocked in the U.K. can be used without any problems in China,” Wright said.

E-Bikes and Balaclavas

The exporters are at the top of a three-tier criminal network, police say. In the middle are the shopkeepers and entrepreneurs who buy stolen phones from thieves and sell them to unsuspecting members of the public or pass them on for transport abroad. On the lowest tier are the thieves. Their numbers have risen in line with the juicy profits on offer, and a growing sense of impunity.

Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70% of thefts last year. And it has risen sharply: The 80,000 phone thefts last year were a stark increase from the 64,000 in 2023, the police told a parliamentary committee in June.

That is partly because this crime is both “very lucrative” and “lower risk” than car theft or drug dealing, Cmdr. Andrew Featherstone, the police officer leading the effort to tackle phone theft, told a news conference. Thieves can make up to 300 pounds (about $400) per device — more than triple the national minimum wage for a day’s work.

And they know they are unlikely to be caught. Police data shows about 106,000 phones were reported stolen in London from March 2024 to February 2025. Only 495 people were charged or were given a police caution, meaning they admitted to an offense.

Of course, many other large cities, including New York, face phone theft. The police in London argue that varying crime recording practices make it impossible to identify where in the world the problem is worst.

Many experts blame a specifically British issue: the impact of years of austerity imposed by Conservative-led governments in the 2010s, which led to cuts in the number of police officers and their budgets. In 2017, the Met said it would stop investigating low-level crimes where it judged there was little prospect of catching the culprits, so it could prioritize tackling serious violence and sexual offenses.

Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City St. George’s, University of London, said in an interview that the police “became more of a reactive force,” adding, “Low-level career criminals realized that they were getting away with the crimes they were committing.”

Then, a technological advance arrived that made their work even easier: electronic bikes. Lime bikes, which can be rented and dropped off anywhere, launched in London in 2018. They exploded in popularity. Before long, e-bikes were the getaway vehicles of choice for phone thieves.

Sgt. Matt Chantry, one of the leaders of the raid last month, said in an interview that thieves on e-bikes were “a real problem.” They mount sidewalks and swipe phones from people’s hands at speed, he said, while making themselves “unidentifiable” by wearing balaclavas and hoods. “How do you police that?” he asked.

Attempting to chase them on London’s sometimes gridlocked streets is “high risk,” he said, endangering pedestrians, other drivers and the offender. Ultimately, he said, the police had to ask, is the risk of a fatality worth it for a cellphone?

Lost and Found: 4,000 iPhones

The raid on the three secondhand shops in north London last month paid off, with the police recovering 40,000 pounds and five stolen phones. Those handsets will join around 4,000 other stolen iPhones recovered by police since December, currently held in a storeroom in Putney, southwest London, as officers try to contact their owners.

In the longer-term, Featherstone said, the police want to dismantle the criminal networks driving the illicit trade and “disincentivize criminals from wanting to steal phones” by making it clear they can be caught.

Police are also hoping users will become more savvy about their personal security. Even as smartphones have become more advanced and valuable, many people’s handling of them has become less protective. For the modern phone thief, a classic mark is a pedestrian walking close to the curb, deeply absorbed by the content on a cell screen — a map, a text, a video.

“You wouldn’t count your money on the street,” said Lawrence Sherman, an emeritus criminology professor at the University of Cambridge. “But when the phone is worth 1,000 pounds, it’s like pulling 1,000 pounds out of your wallet and looking at it as you walk.”