London phone snatchers, the kind who whip past on a bike and grab an iPhone out of your hand, are running into a wall this year. Following a strategic partnership between the city’s Metropolitan Police Service and Apple, robbery numbers have dwindled.
Interestingly, the partnership has nothing to do with catching phone thieves and more to do with making the stolen phones themselves worthless. The end goal is to dismantle the entire resale market by breaking the whole ‘wipe, flip, and profit’ cycle. Breaking one link would effectively lead to the rest of the operation falling apart.
Working with existing features already built into the iPhone, Apple focused on Activation Lock and Stolen Device Protection, both tools designed to brick a phone the second it’s been flagged stolen. The company combed through actual London case data, figured out where the locks were holding and where they were being leaked, and handed every bit of that information over to Met detectives in London.
The decisive strike came in recent weeks, when Apple managed to disable a piece of bypass software that had been doing the rounds in criminal online forums. The software, effectively a thief’s dream toolkit, could undo lock screens, factory-reset stolen handsets, and ready them for the next buyer down the chain.
The effects showed up in the statistics almost immediately, with the Met Police noting that phone robberies across London fell by 14,000 compared to a year prior. In the sprawling borough of Westminster in central London, for instance, where tourists clutch their phones tighter than their passports, the results were even better, with snatches and pickpocketing dropping by 45.8 percent.
It’s worth noting that Apple has been developing new anti-snatch features for a while now, tools intended to disable a grabbed phone within seconds. The London collaboration likely served as real-world testing for the next generation of features, although the company has given no indication as to when they will roll them out more widely.
Sources: Met Police, Bangkok Post, Apple