In this tech-savvy city teeming with commuters and tourists, the
cellphone has become a top target of robbers who use stealth, force and
sometimes guns.
Nearly half of all robberies in San Francisco this year are
cellphone-related, police say, and most occur on bustling transit lines. One
thief recently snatched a smartphone while sitting right behind his
unsuspecting victim and darted out the rear of a bus in mere seconds. Another robber grabbed an iPhone from an oblivious bus rider — while she
was still talking.
And, in nearby Oakland, City Council candidate Dan Kalb was robbed at
gunpoint of his iPhone Wednesday after he attended a neighbourhood anti-crime
meeting. “I thought he was going to shoot me,” recalled Kalb, who had dropped
his phone during the stickup. “He kept saying, ‘Find the phone! Find the
phone!” These brazen incidents are part of a ubiquitous crime wave striking
coast to coast. New York City Police report that more than 40 per cent of all
robberies now involve cellphones.
And cellphone thefts in Los Angeles, which account for more than a
quarter of all the city’s robberies, are up 27 per cent from this time a year
ago, police said. “This is your modern-day purse snatching,” said longtime San
Francisco Police Capt. Joe Garrity, who began noticing the trend here about two
years ago. “A lot of younger folks seem to put their entire lives on these
things that don’t come cheap.” Thefts of cellphones— particularly the expensive
do-it-all smartphones containing everything from photos and music to private
emails and bank account statements— are costing consumers millions of dollars
and sending law enforcement agencies and wireless carriers nationwide
scrambling for solutions.
In San Francisco, police have gone undercover and launched a transit ad
campaign, warning folks to “be smart with your smartphone.” Similar warnings
went out in Oakland, where there have been nearly 1,300 cellphone robberies
this year. When Apple’s ballyhooed iPhone 5 went on sale last month, New York
City police encouraged buyers to register their phone’s serial numbers with the
department. That came just months after a 26-year-old chef at the Museum of
Modern Art was killed for his iPhone while heading home to the Bronx.
In St. Louis, city leaders proposed an ambitious ordinance requiring
anyone who resells cellphones to obtain a secondhand dealers license. Resellers
also would need to record the phone’s identity number and collect detailed
information including the seller’s names, addresses, a copy of their driver’s
licenses — even their thumbprints. “It will take a national solution to make
this problem go away,” St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said of the phone thefts.
Though some experts put annual cellphone losses in the billions of
dollars, there is no precise figure on how many devices are stolen each year. However,
the problem has become so visible that it has caught the attention of lawmakers
and regulators seeking to take the profit out of cellphone theft. In April,
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, and New York City Police Commissioner
Ray Kelly announced that the major U.S. cellphone carriers and the Federal
Communications Commission have agreed to set up a national database to track
reported stolen phones. It is scheduled to launch in late 2013.
Schumer also introduced a bill called the Mobile Device Theft Deterrence
Act, which proposes a five-year prison sentence for tampering with the ID
numbers of a stolen cellphone. The bill is supported by the Cellular Telecommunications
Industry Association (CTIA), a Washington, D.C. advocacy group.
In addition, CTIA officials said carriers are expected to launch
individual databases later this month to permanently disable a cellphone
reported stolen. The initiative is similar to a successful decade-old strategy
in Australia. Previously, U.S. carriers have only been able to disable
so-called SIM cards, which can be swapped in and out of phones. That’s led to a
profitable black market for stolen phones. Chris Guttman-McCabe, CTIA’s
vice-president of regulatory affairs, said the goal of creating theft databases
is to render stolen cellphones worthless. “We want to dry up the aftermarket,”
Guttman-McCabe said. “Hopefully, there will be no sense in stealing a phone and
a once valuable piece of hardware will essentially turn into useless metal.”
Right now, the incentive is to steal and that’s creating huge losses,
said Kevin Mahaffey, a co-founder of Lookout, a San Francisco-based mobile
security firm, which has advised carriers about the national database. “Thieves
know that carrying a smartphone is like carrying $500 in your hands,” said
Mahaffey. His company estimates that stolen and lost cellphones could cost
American consumers more than $30 billion this year. Many cities with highest
rates of stolen and lost phones also rank among the FBI’s listing of U.S.
cities with the highest crime rates, including Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland and
Newark, N.J., Mahaffey said.
Meanwhile, cellphone thefts and police response continue at a frenzied
pace. In Chicago, two men were each charged with armed robbery last week after
stealing an iPhone from a teen. In Oakland, nearly three dozen people were
recently arrested during a sweep for allegedly stealing smartphones. On
Tuesday, police arrested 15-year-old boy who allegedly swiped a woman’s iPhone
near Oakland’s City Hall and sold it in downtown San Francisco for $200 to buy
marijuana. “It’s a quick crime of opportunity, a snatch and grab, either by
foot or on bike,” Officer Johnna Watson, an Oakland police spokeswoman, said.
“The thieves are gone in an instant.”
Metro News Canada
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