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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."
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.
Sharyl Attkisson (formerly of the Washington bureau for CBS News) explains it here.
They don't want hard hitting stories. They're cowed, either by government and political forces or corporate forces and pressure groups.
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!
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
They are just waiting for a blog to get a million hits, and they they are ON IT!
Michael Isikoff just bailed on NBC News for the same reason.
"I had a good ride at NBC, and I’m proud of a lot of what I was able to do there. But it was increasingly clear they were moving in directions in which there were going to be fewer opportunities for my work."
Isikoff is an investigative reporter.
Unfortunately, that's always the end result of having ads pay for journalism. At some point, there's always a conflict. And money will always will.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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."
There should be a balance. The ad sales mean nothing if the show (website, paper, whatever) has no viewers. The question is, who is this audience and why are they so apathetic that they're still willing to watch?
The IMEI isn't a routable phone number. It's an identifier (that is supposed to be) unique to each handset, somewhat like a serial number.
[Citation Needed]
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.
+1
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
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day. Think about BGP, but needing to track individual IP's of being nomadic (hell). Telcos do it because pretty much every exchange in the planet can commit point to point channel forwarding at this point, but in the IP world, that would be one a crazy, ineffective, and costly route.
Bye!
Its all about what clothes Kate Middleton is wearing on her tour of New Zealand with some balding Brittish guy these days.
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"
Did you even watch the video attached to the story?
was there a time when newspapers weren't funded by ads, or a place in the world (even weekly or monthly periodicals come stuffed with ads to fund a large portion of the budget).
in 2009 the BBC paid a call center worker, who was assigned to the US, to take 3 calls for the UK queue and write down the callers CC number. The three callers were working for the BBC. They then published a story that "you cannot trust call centers in India", because they will take your number, and they pulled in the three "victims" to say on camera that they were appalled.
Wow, you might consider moving.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So the BBC showed that a call center worker would record the cc numbers of callers if they were paid (and were told it was for the BBC?). How is that not a problem? What's to stop me, for example, calling that worker and paying for some cc numbers - even if I have to claim i work for the BBC?
Unfortunately, that's always the end result of having ads pay for journalism. At some point, there's always a conflict. And money will always will.
This, due to the unique way the BBC is funded, they don't have to cave to advertisers whims.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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.
;)
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
The point is that they performed illegal actions to generate a story. They did not find a story, they are the story.
Indeed.
The main (formerly govt monopoly) telco in New Zealand shut down virtually all media reporting of major fines it'd been hit with for illegal anticompetitive activities by threatening to pull all ad space in the time between the story was reported as "late breaking, more at 10" on the 6pm TV news and the 10pm news (both channels which ran news programs at the time ran them at 6 and 10pm)
Only IDG computerworld ran the story - and it's no coincidence that the telco didn't advertise in that.
It wasn't the first time a large company had shut down unfavourable press by thrreatening to withhold adverts, but it was the first time it had been done so effectively and across all mass media.
Searching on paid agitators indcated more paid agitators were at OWS than tea party events.
Learn to love Alaska
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
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day.
Note that "recently" in this context probably means several decades ago. SPC exchanges having been around since the 1960s.