More than 700 people were arrested and hundreds of suspected stolen mobile phones seized in one month by officers from Britain’s biggest police force. The Metropolitan Police carried out operations including the arrest of a 21-year-old suspect who fled on an e-bike and jumped into a pond.
Footage shows suspect tossing stolen phones
Shocking footage showed the man tossing the stolen phones as he fled. Officers waded into the pond to find the phones wrapped in foil – a tactic used to block location tracking.
Last month, hundreds of suspects were arrested for phone theft, robbery and handling stolen goods, and investigators seized drugs, knives, guns, cash and more than 110 illegal e-bikes.
Pressure on phone companies
Earlier this year, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley pushed phone companies to make stolen handsets ‘unusable bricks’. It comes after the force revealed it had seen adverts on Snapchat offering children as much as £380 to steal a single iPhone, with a bonus of £100 for stealing 10.
The international trade in stolen phones is worth millions of dollars, with a device stolen in London worth more in countries like China because it has none of the government restrictions put in place by authorities there.
Rising offences and falling numbers
On Thursday, the Met said that 3,963 phone thefts and robbery offences were recorded in August this year, compared with 3,311 in August 2022. The intervening months saw totals of 4,542 in August 2023, 5,597 in August 2024 and 5,099 in August 2025, the force said.
Criminals are increasingly using social engineering to get into phones, the force warned, by posing as known businesses and contacting victims on other devices in a bid to get passwords and account details. The force said that phone theft and robbery fell from 81,439 offences in 2024 to 71,867 in 2025, and that between January and August this year, there were 39,793 offences, down from 49,136 in the same period last year.
Low recovery rates
Figures released under Freedom of Information legislation show only a fraction of devices taken in London are returned to their owners. Between 2017 and February 27 2024, a total 587,498 phones were stolen in London excluding the City, 13,998 of which were recovered, and 573,500 were not.
According to figures for the year to the end of December 2025, the force also solved one of the smallest proportions of these offences compared with others in England and Wales. In that year, 6.9% of personal robbery cases ended with a suspect being identified and dealt with, while the rate was 0.9% for theft from the person.
