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Inside the Stolen Smartphone Black Market In London
First time accepted submitter WebAgeCaveman (3615807) writes in with news about just how big the stolen smartphone black market is. "A black market of shops and traders willing to deal in stolen smartphones has been exposed by a BBC London undercover investigation.
Intelligence was received that some shops across a swathe of east London were happy to buy phones from thieves.
Two traders were filmed buying Samsung S3 and iPhone 4 devices from a researcher posing as a thief - despite him making it clear they were stolen.
The shops involved have declined to comment."
Who knew a 21st century black market had so much singing and dancing in it? I guess it is London, though.
Too busy doing puff pieces on Obama's cat?
(Or Bush's cat... Or Clinton's cat... You get the picture.)
Under a 2002 law it was made illegal to change the IMEI unless you're the manufacturer. However, under a 2006 amendment to the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 it was made illegal to even OFFER to do this. You don't have to actually change the IMEI to commit the offense, you just have to offer or say you will. Punishment is up to 5 years in prison. The smartphone blackmarket could be wiped out just by enforcing this law.
Ok, so, apocryphal stories, check. Stats with no useful contextual data, check. (The number of deaths by falling pianos is up 100%!!)
A cell phone kill switch is still a phenomenally bad idea. Let's not let the media sell us on it with heart rending stories about some random person being robbed for their smartphone.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
BBC has been known to have a fake player x and fake player y to create a story. So formula goes: Player X contact Player Y to do something illegal-> Player Y agrees to do something illegal + adds good sound bite -> BBC only reports from Player X point of view and uses "sound bite" to make Player Y, as representative industry,which now look deplorable to the common reader. Thus, this report should be taken with a grain of salt.
I don't think much has changed since Dickens to be honest.
The specifics change, but human nature doesn't.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good and valuable piece of journalism. But I doubt the findings will be a surprise to anybody who's lived in the more central areas of London (or any other major UK city), outside of a few sheltered enclaves.
I lived for a few years living around the New Cross/Bermondsey area (south of the river, but similar in demographic to the areas in TFA) and there were always a few electronics shops whose existence seemed fundamentally implausible if their business was founded on anything other than handling stolen goods. I avoided them like the plague, but they were generally pretty resilient businesses - and if one closed down, another would spring up a few streets away. I'm not saying that any business which looks a bit grungy is dishonest. I've made some good purchases at backstreet computer stores which get good prices on the back of low overheads and connections with legitimate suppliers (though such places are rare these days since the online boom). But there's a certain type of business which is offering games consoles or other commodity goods at the kind of prices that just make you go "hmm".
Hell, even going back well before that, I can remember independent video games stores "Ooop North" (from the tail end of the period before the big chains drove most of them to the wall, around the early PS1/N64 era) who were well known among my teenaged peers for staying in business on the basis of a combination of modchipping and fencing stolen goods. In fact, I remember one very close to my school being raided by police and shut down (presumably after crossing some nebulous line into their visible spectrum). Provided a fascinating distraction during the middle of an otherwise dull day at school.
As the whole modchipping thing implies, these have never been businesses run by people without a degree of tech-savvy. It's no surprise that they've moved onto circumventing mobile phone protections. And I bet you'd find similar businesses in, at the very least, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.
There have even been suggestions - though I offer no comment as to their veracity - that a well-known red-logoed chain of second hand electronics stores with a presence in almost every town in the UK might sometimes be less than choosy about checking the provenance of the goods it accepts.
Why it's no secret where these traders and shops operate. The place where anything and everything you want is sold! I'm speaking of course about Portobello Road!
It's a revelation.
A cell phone kill switch is still a phenomenally bad idea.
Depends on what you mean by a "kill switch". I don't think a world wide "bad ESN/IMEI" registry would be a bad thing myself. But that's not a "hit the button, wipe your phone into uselessness" kill switch.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There is absolutely no reason why changing a phone number should be difficult. I would like to be able to assign myself, say, 1000 new phone numbers. Of course I would not pay for them. The phone numbers could be longer, I don't care if they are 30 digits long. Then I could hand out a new one anytime I'm asked for one. I understand that our telcos don't want this and would never dream of helping out with this. Fortunately, most voice communication will not be handled the way it currently is pretty soon and such a thing would be possible.
If the BBC can do this ... why aren't the police doing so ? They would not need to do it very often, just enough to put the fear of god in those who act as a fence.
My sister's friend recently had her phone stolen in LA. She tracked her phone to a phone shop in the worst part of town. When she confronted the store owner about it he had the nerve to tell her "we don't rat out our suppliers."
I think there is already a kill switch... don't pay your bill or call up your cell provider and ask them to cancel it they can already stop service.
This conversation is about a IMEI that can't be changed and a list stolen IMEIs so nobody can use a stolen phone. Nobody is asking for a tiny explosive on the mainboard to toast the phone when it's stolen although I think that would be cool and dangerous.
Well, did BBC investigate the alternative? Will these cash-dispensing kiosks do a better job? http://flipsy.com/blog/13/11/e... Maybe, if you have to have your photograph taken to get the cash?
Gently reply
wouldn't it be easier to buy the cell phones from eBay, Amazon, AT&T, Verizon Sprint, U.S. Cellular store instead of a black market? I must be missing something.
An excellent parallel argument could be made about Texas and most of California with respect to Mexico.
If you were actually paying attention and not just listening to wankers with friends in the 32CSC, amazing progress has been made with respect to Northern Ireland and pretty much everyone is happy about it except a few Unionists, who could not remotely be said to speak for the mainland.
But you weren't, were you.
Yes, there is a direct link between someone in England in the early 21st being willing to purchase a stolen mobile phone and the English conquest of Ireland in the 16th century. As an Englishman I'm very glad that you, someone who from a quick skim of their previous comments appears to reside in the United States of America, a country with a spotless record of territory acquisition, have raised this. Perhaps you be so kind as to post your thoughts on how best the return of the stolen land may be achieved. We tried giving most of it back already but some of the people living in the northern bit are rather vocal about wishing it remain part of the UK.
Speaking as someone who's been robbed for his cellphone twice - bring it on!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
You'll die before that happens, and hopefully it will rankle in your soul right to the end.
Enjoy!
The problem with the stolen IMEI number list is that people like AT&T that already abuse internal lists will then be able to fuck over phone owners that are customers of other companies. For example, AT&T put my new iPhone on their stolen list while it was being shipped to me new. Because of that, I had to buy another phone at full price in order to be allowed to keep my unlimited data plan. I was able to sell the phone that AT&T fucked over for $350. If there was a blacklist that was shared between providers, my new iPhone would have been worthless. That is what AT&T wants. They love fucking over people. That is why the Republicans help them so much. They hate us.
Wow, you might consider moving.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I've English and I haven't stolen any land from anyone.
Because Asurion. Handset insurance almost invariably involves refurbished units. If the baseband of one phone is broken, but the mainboard of another is okay, which IMEI do you use? The answer is to scrap them both and generate a new one on the refurbished unit. Even for the phones that don't support this, it is still technically a "different phone" that has its cracked screen replaced, because if that phone then needs an insurance replacement, retaining the IMEI will garner a "but this phone has already been replaced" situation. If the IMEI changes, it makes it all but impossible for refurbs to be reliably done.
YLE in Finland. Ok, not technically a newspaper but they do news. And investigating reporting.
Funded by law directly by people. Not from a budget that politicians could easily kill. They get half a billion every year in a country of 5 million people. Wish they used them better than buying HBO shows. Sigh. ( yea, they do good job usually, but they could do so much more with the money that goes to HBO shows and international sports )
Wow, you might consider moving.
In some parts of the world cellphones are known as "mobile" phones or "portable" phones. Maybe he wasn't at home when they were stolen?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm english and I recognise that we stole America from the native Americans. Let's give it back.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Under a 2002 law it was made illegal to change the IMEI unless you're the manufacturer.
It's a Chuck Schumer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... bill that he introduces every couple of years, it gets thrown to the Judiciary committee, and then it dies in committee. Like clockwork. Here's the text of the current bill, which is presently dying in the Judiciary committee right now: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/...:
The people who care about this are the people who traffic in stolen phones, and the people who want to buy a handset and use the same SIM in a different GSM phone, or who want to change the MEID on a new phone so that they don't have to re-up their Verizon contract once they are paying month-to-month for their CDMA phone. And the phone companies, that want you to have to re-up your contract to get a new phone. It's the same reason there's about zero incentive to update the OS in Android phones, since if they never update the OS, in order to get the new +0.0.1 version number bump, you have to get a new phone, and the manufacturer gets to sell another phone, and the phone company gets to lock you into a new 2 year contract every 18 months when the new shiny object becomes available.
Since it's a PITA to get a phone unlocked for international roaming, since it has to be listed by ID with the cell network in the country you are traveling to, and it can take many weeks to get them to actually unlock the thing, and do the registration, most times it's just easier to clone the IMEI to your old phone, and then either destroy the old phone, or do an IMEI swap. This is a common "repair/refurbish" technique, and you'll notice that it's allowed under the Schumer bill.
You might also see both NASDAQ OMX Group and TeleCommunication Systems Inc. campaign contributions, and you'll notice contributions from Facebook in 2012, the year the bill was introduced, when Facebook was going big into the mobile market. http://influenceexplorer.com/p...
Little bit of vested interest there.
The problem with the stolen IMEI number list is that people like AT&T that already abuse internal lists will then be able to fuck over phone owners that are customers of other companies. For example, AT&T put my new iPhone on their stolen list while it was being shipped to me new. Because of that, I had to buy another phone at full price in order to be allowed to keep my unlimited data plan. I was able to sell the phone that AT&T fucked over for $350. If there was a blacklist that was shared between providers, my new iPhone would have been worthless. That is what AT&T wants. They love fucking over people. That is why the Republicans help them so much. They hate us.
You're kind of whacked out, I think...
Except the class action lawsuit that's currently being pursued against AT&T to force the implementation of the kill switch is being brought by Democratic judge R. Parker White of the lawfirm of Poswell, White, and Cutler... http://pwclawcorp.com/attorney... per this article: http://www.courthousenews.com/...
And the sponsored legislation demanding the kill switch is coming from San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón (Democrat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...ón after being appointed to that post by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (Democrat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... as a replacement for Kamala Harris (Democrat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... .
But, you know, feel free to believe that AT&T "wants" a kill switch, and that the Republicans are the one pushing the issue. While you are at it, be sure and note that Apple iPhones already have a kill switch, and the idea of requiring a kill switch is a more or less transparent ploy by Apple against Android, which doesn't have one, and doesn't provide software updates for their phones because of the way the Android development is done.
Wow, you might consider moving.
In some parts of the world cellphones are known as "mobile" phones or "portable" phones. Maybe he wasn't at home when they were stolen?
I assumed that. I know "robbed" technically implies a home invasion, but I was assuming he meant "mugged". (Which I agree may not be a valid assumption.) My comment meant: If the crime rate in the area where you live is so high that being robbed for something as trivial as a cell phone (it used to be tennis shoes...) is common, you might consider relocating to some place where that's less likely to happen. Parenthetically, I think this (not robbed for cell phones but crime rates in general) might have been the original reason people who could afford it moved out of the city into the suburbs.
I travel around the continental US for work, was an early adopter of cell phones, (worked as a contractor for a provider for awhile) and I've never had a phone stolen. Not once. Of course, (a) I always have my cell on me, so stealing it would involve interacting with me in some fashion (and I'm pretty big...) (b) I tend to buy a little better than I need and then keep it for a very long time, so the cell I'm carrying at any given moment is pretty beat up, and (c) I've never owned an Apple mobile device. I think they're trendy nonsense and I'm not surprised that they get stolen a lot. Like trendy overpriced tennis shoes used to be. But mostly, I try to stay out of areas where crime is common. (That time in Miami was an accident....)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My comment meant: If the crime rate in the area where you live is so high that being robbed for something as trivial as a cell phone
Why do you persist in thinking he was robbed where he lived?
Parenthetically, I think this might have been the original reason people who could afford it moved out of the city into the suburbs.
How many people who live in the suburbs work in the suburbs?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
...to mention they are funded by a MANDATORY tax on all TV set owners.
What? This is a UK story referring to UK laws, so it certainly has nothing to do with a US senator, even if he happens to creating laws along similar lines in the US.
My white trash in-laws and their shady tweaker friend deal in stolen smart phones. Basically the main guy (the tweaker friend, about 50 years old) has an army of younger tweakers that ride around on the trolly, go into bars, restaruants, etc and snatch up phones that people put down for a minute. The main guy pays the tweaker minions $40 per phone as long as it is a smart phone is less than 2 years old. Then he pulls the sim cards and sells them on craigslist and ebay. It's incredibly shady and everytime my inlaws bring it up I tell them to STFU about it because I have no interest and it pisses me off.
No. Texas was recognized as an independent country for 10 years before it joined the US. Even Mexico recognized it, I think (not to clear on the details, they become moot after a 100+ years and other treaties recognizing the independence). So the US had no direct dealings or conflict with Mexico with regards to Texas.
Learn to love Alaska
And what about Australia and NZ? And since many of the people came from England, is England ready to accept all white NZ, OZ, and USA peoples back? How much Native American does one need to have to claim US ownership?
Learn to love Alaska