Britain’s phone theft kingpins: Gang who export HALF of UK’s snatched handsets and made a fortune shipping 40,000 to China is smashed in dramatic raids  

A gang responsible for exporting almost half of the mobile phones stolen on Britain’s streets has been dismantled in an extraordinary sting operation. 

Scotland Yard’s commissioner hailed the series of raids as the ‘biggest counter-phone theft operation in the world.’ 

Roughly 300 officers smashed into 28 homes across London simultaneously in the dead of night to arrest groups of pickpockets and robbers behind an epidemic of snatch thefts. 

Two days previously, two Afghan gang leaders thought to be responsible for shipping 40,000 stolen devices to China and Hong Kong were dragged from their car and arrested in north London. 

The two men, codenamed Heron and Seagull, are at the head of a gang responsible for fuelling Britain’s £70million-a-year phone theft epidemic and were caught with a bundle of devices wrapped in foil to block their tracking signal, police chiefs said. 

The car driven by the pair, aged 34 and 32, was a people carrier that had been converted into a mobile ‘chop shop’ used to disable and transport the stolen devices. 

The men had sent thousands of phones to the very same high-rise block in Hong Kong that was infiltrated by Mail reporters in an investigation in July. 

The Mail tracked a phone stolen from an estate agent on London’s iconic Baker Street across the globe to the office building, where it sat alongside hundreds of thousands of other handsets. 

Scotland Yard’s enormous policing operation came about because of a chance discovery made on Christmas Eve at Heathrow Airport. 

A woman had tracked her stolen phone to a nearby warehouse and spoke with a security guard who happened to be a former Metropolitan Police officer, according to detective inspector Mark Gavin, who would later lead the operation, codenamed Echosteep. 

‘Together, they found her phone in a box with 894 other stolen devices,’ he added. 

This discovery allowed the Met to identify suspects and, for the first time, piece together vital intelligence about a sophisticated supply chain involving gangsters from around the world. 

Detectives established that there were three levels of criminal involved in the operation. 

On the streets are the thieves, who can make between £300 and £500 for every phone they steal from an unsuspecting member of the public. 

‘Sometimes we see these almost Fagin-like characters who bring in a load of phones at a time from various street-level thieves,’ Mr Gavin said. 

The next level up are the individuals who run shop premises where the stolen phones are collected. 

Then, at the head of the operation are the criminals who export the devices in bulk to their contacts overseas, with just under a third sent to Algeria, 20 per cent to mainland China and seven per cent to Hong Kong. 

Seagull and Heron are thought to be at this top level, Mr Gavin said. 

‘One thing with these gangs that is very unusual is that different groups of various nationalities all work together and cooperate like normal businesses because there is so much money to be made,’ he added. 

‘There is less of the tribal rivalry you get with drugs gangs. Indeed, we are seeing many drugs gangs move into this space because the profits are so good and there is much less risk. 

‘We are shifting some of our county lines and firearms resources onto tackling phone theft.’ 

A stolen phone can be blocked by network providers in the UK but can still function on foreign networks. 

Demand is high in China because Chinese-made phones are often designed to block internet usage, whereas European models allow free use of the web. 

Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who commended the Mail’s own investigation tracing stolen phones across the globe, said: 

‘This is the biggest counter mobile phone theft operation ever in the UK and probably in the world. 

‘And given we’re breaking down the business from the thieves, the handlers and the exporters, we should see a big effect on the amount of mobile phone theft in London. 

‘We have put together an intelligence picture that has led to this organised crime network that is exporting 40,000 phones to Hong Kong – which is about half the phones stolen in London.’

Among the properties raided simultaneously at 5am on September 25 was a home in Enfield, north London, which housed 13 people, including three generations of the same family. 

About 30 officers from the Met’s specialist public order unit, the Territorial Support Group, stormed into the house and arrested a Bulgarian man and woman accused of snatching phones across the capital. 

The woman, wearing a purple dressing grown, was handcuffed and marched into a waiting police van as officers scoured the home for stolen devices and other evidence. 

Sir Mark said the operation would make a ‘huge dent’ in the wave of phone thefts on Britain’s streets, but voiced his frustration at tech giants such as Apple for failing to stop the trade. 

The Met has been in conversation with Apple for more than a year about implementing a ‘kill switch’ that would render a stolen phone useless, and have asked that serial numbers are displayed more prominently so recovered devices can be reunited with their owners. 

Currently, just 20 per cent of recovered phones can be returned. 

But the US firm, which launched the iPhone 17 last month, has so far taken no action. 

‘I don’t know why they wouldn’t want to help make their customers safer,’ Sir Mark said. 

‘Many of us will remember when the theft of car stereos was very common but it doesn’t happen anymore because they’re fully integrated into the car. 

‘So one simple design change eliminated the problem. They could kill demand overnight by implementing these simple changes. 

‘If a stolen phone was only usable for a few spare parts then it would be worth far less to the thieves, the middlemen and the gang leaders.’ 

At least 230 phones were stolen every day on average in the UK last year. This is twice as many as five years ago and the total is rising.

London is the epicentre, with 75 per cent of phone thefts, but the problem is nationwide, with every major police force recording thousands of stolen phones every year. 

Even rural areas such as Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire cannot escape the problem. 

Policing minister Sarah Jones, whose two sons have both been robbed by phone thieves, said the operation was ‘a brilliant example of lots of different parts of the Met Police coming together to tackle very serious organised crime.’ 

She added: ‘Almost everyone knows somebody who has had their phone stolen in London. 

‘We need to break this business model and this is the largest single operation the world has ever seen that does this.’ 

The Met is hosting an international conference with 27 other countries next May where countering phone theft measures will be discussed with politicians and policing leaders. 

So far this year, personal robbery has dropped by 13 per cent and theft is down 14 per cent. 

Commander Andrew Featherstone, the Met’s lead for tackling phone theft, said the force still had plenty to do but insisted that these statistics contradicted any narrative that London was not a safe city. 

‘No doubt that for certain parties it suits them to say London is the most dangerous place on the planet,’ he said. 

‘But these statistics show this simply isn’t true. ‘We are not suggesting it’s the safest place on earth either but like most things the reality is somewhere in between, and we have made some really good ground here in cutting down these acquisitive crimes.’