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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having? Or is this a feature chasing after fears of the bogeyman, leading to concrete inconveniences like this?

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> Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having?

Yes absolutely

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/phone-london-snatch-9.7204104

Thanks! Given this was CBC, my jaw hit the floor when I saw London. I live 20 mins from London, Ontario and 70k thefts in a year would be _insane_. Then I realized it was about London, U.K. and my jaw only hit the table. 70k is still insane, though.

Even the CBC thinks of London, England before London, Ontario.

Poor London. (Ontario.) (Canada.)

They should have called it New London.

That's in Connecticut and it's older than London, Ontario:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London,_Connecticut

or 'Fake London'

Is it really insane? That is less than 200 per day, in a city of 15 million people.. a single gang of 20 thieves could likely manage that! The real question is, how does this compare to other cities of this size and demographics?

Why compare demographics?

I would expect a city that's mostly retirement communities to have less snatch-and-run thefts than a city where tourists make up a large part of the population at any given time.

Retired people a probably quite easy targets in this scenario.

Not if they drive everywhere

Interestingly, Tokyo has a much larger population than London with a very low crime rate. I can’t find specific numbers on stolen phones (only lost phone statistics are published) but robberies/muggings are 0.04 per 1,000 yearly versus London’s 2.83 per 1,000. Seoul has a similar rate to Tokyo, 0.4 to 0.5.

Also, is there even a single city of London’s size that is mostly retirement communities?

The kind of crime in Tokyo that is happening may also just not be reported

In Beijing robberies are 0.55 per 1,000. In Taipei it’s an unbelievable 0.0036 per 1,000, although general theft is higher at 2.12 (compared to London at 52.9). Are all these countries underreporting?

Singapore is 0.01 per 1,000. Hanoi doesn’t have published statistics but its Numbeo crime index (calculated from surveys) is 33.8 versus London at 55.3.

I think we can stop excusing London’s numbers.

Want a non-Asian country in case Asians are somehow magical beings who don’t do robberies? Ottawa is 0.11 to 0.13 per 1,000. Vancouver is 0.73 per 1,000. Sydney is 0.13 to 0.15 per 1,000. Dubai is 0.03 to 0.045 per 1,000.

London is supposed to be a global city on par with many of these others. So what is going wrong?

It’s hard to get good stats on Cairo, but its crime index is lower than London somehow, despite the higher levels of poverty. Same with Islamabad and Jaipur.

It always shocks me how people like to excuse crime in London. 70000 phones snatched in a year. 3000 stabbings a year.

The phone snatchings are so common that I can name several victims from completely different walks of life. Maybe the most mental incident was when a colleague's phone was snatched then subsequently ditched on the floor cos it was too old to be worth the trouble of fencing...

As a native Londoner I didn't realise how much baggage I carried wrt crime until I moved to Singapore and realised that leaving your front door open, your car unlocked or your phone on a restaurant table aren't crimes you apparently deserve to be immediately punished for.

It's kind of nice knowing that children and the elderly can go about their day without fear of crime or that women can be unsupervised at night without fear of violence. It's actually very liberating being free from the tyranny of crime.

One would have to literally have one’s head in the sand to not know what’s going wrong in London. Or Melbourne. Or Los Angeles or New York.

What exactly are you arguing and why? 70,000 is a lot of stolen phones. The number of thieves is irrelevant.

200 SNATCHED phones a day is insane number, I seriously doubt in 10 times smaller European cities you will find 20 people per day with someone snatching their phone

I'd say it's a lot higher than this. This is just the reported numbers.

I live in London and I'm fairly careless. Yesterday when I hopped onto a bus a driver told me I was crazy for holding my phone out infront of me and that it would be snatched if I kept that up.

I could list 10 people I know that have had their phone stolen at some point in the last few years. I've also seen it happen several times. It's very common.

Why is there a single one? If zero traffic deaths is an achievable goal then surely zero thefts are too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

Let me check my maths...

So population of london is 9M

Say your network and you is 250 people. (friends, colleague, family, neighbours, community)

Probability (P) of not being chosen[0]: 1-200/9M

Probability of your network (PN) not being chosen[1]: P^250

Probability of your network not being chosen everyday for 1 year: PN^365 = 13%

I'm not very confident with statistics but if I assembled that correctly that means in any given year, you'd only expect 13% odds that no one you care about was a victim of phone snatching crime, That's kind of bleak tbh

[0] realistically the odds are a lot worse and the probability won't be uniformly distributed: people living in Surrey or Chiswick are going to have different odds to someone who lives in Soho or works in Central London. Suddenly the "at risk" population can get pretty small when you think about it because grannies and 2 year olds aren't walking around Warren Street station at peak theft hours with their phone out.

[1] I realise that this doesn't handle replacement but for big population and small subset this should approximate

The number is too high, but dropping: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx4762znr6o

Why bother stealing iPhones? Is it just for the scrap/recycle->repair value?

They send them to countries where they aren't locked or break it down for parts.

> They send them to countries where they aren't locked

iphones will remain locked regardless of what country they're in. I presume you're talking about states who are seemingly unwilling to pursue/prosecute claims of theft?

there's still a fairly lucrative parts stripping market and there are extreme efforts that are used to "unlock" locked devices - it has been known in the Chinese marketplace that you could get paired chips to do SMD rework with a "clean" set of identifiers. they'll swap the SOC, the flash, and the wireless all for a few bucks.

older iOS devices as well are also vulnerable to having their syscfg rewritten via exploits, so you can "clean" a locked device that way as well with a good set of serials. Apple Watches are a hot one for this.

On top of that a sizable percentage of theft victims don't even bother to report it stolen.

You can't activate the hardware with a different ID regardless. It requires the owner to relinquish ownership.

I'm sure this is different with different components of course depending on how granularly apple tracks their hardware—but the whole package certainly can't be activated.

My high level understanding is there are countries where things like IMEI barring aren't enforced and the actual unlocking of the phone is possible. Via jailbreaking or flashing I presume

Not possible on modern iPhones.

Pegasus installed via zero click 0 day exploit.

Completely owned.

Nobody is wasting nation-state exploits to launder stolen phones.

You can send them to Chinese chop-shops and still turn a decent buck.

There's also a scam where they contact the owner from abroad, offering to return it, claiming they're an innocent trying to activate a used phone they spent their last dollar on, or threatening the original user into unlocking it. They will say that they're hackers, connected to criminals in your home city, using your name and recent photos to say that they're going to expose your text messages. Anything to get an unlock.

Ever since phones became pretty immune to reselling-theft (steal phone, reset it, sell it) people have been snatching phones and trying to empty crypto, banks, etc before it locks. Some apps don't reauthenticate.

Interesting point. The article linked in a sibling comment (about 2025 thefts) suggests that they are being resold. Which makes sense if it's a $2000 product that's so stealable. But I do recall there being a lot of difficulty resetting a phone that isn't yours. Do you feel the is article wrong? Are there ways around it? Is "pretty immune to reselling-theft" a newer feature than 2025?

Activation Lock now extends to the serials of the parts inside every iPhone since Apple knows the S/N of everything. If you pull the battery off an Activation Locked phone and put it in another phone it's going to freak out and complain the part is pairing-locked and won't pair to your device but it'll be baseline usable. You'll just keep getting nasty nags in the Settings letting you know you're using stolen parts.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/activation-lock-sec...

As of iOS 27 beta, there's now an additional "partner finance lock" status that will also be an available parts-lock status (to prevent a 'leased' device from being parted out).

https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/ios-27-code-suggests-apple-co...

If I have your unlocked iPhone, I could probably reset your Apple ID because I have access to your email and your texts so I can reset your Apple ID password unlock your phone unlock. Remove it from Find My and reset it.

It makes me wonder if there’s some way to put a third lock on there that’s not normally unlocked.

I’m almost sure that you need some password or biometrics to reset Apple ID, change Find My or change biometrics. Moreover if you don’t trust FaceID you can easily lock it (to ask for password instead of biometrics) when needed.

Bonus security on iPhone - if you long-press on any app, you can click "Require Face ID" and it will make thieves need your face again to open bank or sensitive apps. I did this for all my financial apps amd also email so they can't reset passwords. It isna minor inconvenience but would hopefully prevent an unlocked phone from being stolen and having bank accounts emptied.

Android Private Space https://support.google.com/android/answer/15341885?hl=en

The email is what most people miss. Unlocked phone = SMS and email for most people.

It's a big enough problem in Brazil that the government has an official app to report incidents of phone theft:

https://www.gov.br/pt-br/apps/celular-seguro-br

https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/comunicar-roubo-furto-de-a...

>an official app to report incidents of phone theft

I can't be the only person to see the irony here. Do they also have a drive-thru to report car theft?

RTFM

After you install it you cana "safe contact" or do the reporting on a website which will blocklist the phone's IMEI on all phone companies, block any banking app sessions and remotely wipe the phone.

It also functions as a public searchable database of stolen phones, allowing a prospective buyer of a second hand device to check it.

Thats actually pretty awesome.

Societies often try to address low-probability-high-cost risks.

City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.

The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.

In Mexico, apparently, the scheme is to grab a phone from an inattentive pedestrian from a motorcycle or scooter.

Glitterbombs would be a fun solution except the guys doing would probably get pissed and do bodily harm...

As someone from South America I find it interesting that people born and raised in developed countries would think that phone-snatching detection is a bogeyman feature. Over there it's a given that your belongings can stop being yours at any given moment just 'cause.

Yes, its why those long crossbody lanyards are now so popular.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mggh4ll/a/crossbody-strap...

Massive in London.

Eh, it certainly gets a lot of _attention_, and London is very, very big, so the absolute numbers are impressive-looking. The chances of it actually happening to any given person are extremely low, though.

Ha. I was in London for work and had my phone snatched on a work trip the second day. Kings Cross area. Massive pain to get insurance to figure it out and I had to buy a burner.

Two guys hopped a wide sidewalk, never stopped and were back into traffic in an instant.

Everyone gave me the "you should't have been dressed that way" response. Police did nothing dispite certainly plenty of evidence (video, from apple, etc. etc).

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