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New York Thieves Wearing Apple Store T-Shirts Steal $16,000 In iPhones (pix11.com)
An anonymous reader quotes this article from a TV station in New York about a "brazen daylight heist" made possible by wearing the right t-shirt:
Two thieves put on Apple store employee T-shirts and headed past the Genius Bar to the repair room, grabbed what they could and walked out with more than $16,000 worth of stolen iPhones... Police said just one hour before, the same thieves may have stolen three iPhones 6's worth $1,900 from the Apple Store on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue in the West Village... Earlier this year, three thieves pulled off two similar, but much more lucrative heists, at the Upper West Side Apple Store at Broadway and 67th Street, a training center for Apple employees. Once again, they dressed as Apple employees and stole a total of $49,000 worth of iPhones.
What can you actually do with a stolen iphone at this point?
There are presumably markets where IMEI blacklists won't cause you any trouble(or you can use the thing as a glorified ipod touch); but Apple presumably has knowledge of serial numbers/device IDs/etc. and there aren't a lot of alternatives for things like iOS updates Indeed, if they felt like it, Apple would be in an excellent position to brick the devices if they ever made the mistake of accepting an update from Apple.
Do they just part them out? Are their actually still jailbreaks and such for the newer models good enough that you can operate one outside of Apple's sight? Do you just resell them to optimistic idiots looking for suspiciously good deals on idevices and make this their problem?
I can see that 'compact, expensive, widely desired' are all good qualities in a theft target; but 'bristling with radios and globally unique IDs burned into the hardware and firmware; and nearly impossible to use without the vendor's continued cooperation' seem like egregiously bad qualities.