I was outside my local Waitrose store in Holborn, in Central London, standing no more than 75 cms from the brightly lit glass double doors almost exactly three years ago, speaking on my brand new iPhone, which I was holding in my uplifted left hand. Suddenly, in a flash, my hand was empty, and I noticed a slim young man in a hoodie pedalling fast, as he disappeared down a very narrow medieval-era passageway just past the supermarket, brandishing my precious phone in his right hand, as he steered his bike with his left hand.
Gobsmacked, with my mouth open, my brain was busy trying to process exactly what I had just experienced. Within seconds, a young groceries delivery rider, his own bike leaning against the store’s plate glass windows, moved towards me “Hey, I just saw what happened.. .hard luck, mate.. shit happens…would you like to use my phone to call the police?”
Amazingly, within eight or nine minutes, three young coppers, two guys and a female, appeared on foot, bristling with all the electronic equipment British Bobbies on the Beat about their person, in response to my 999 (112 in Italy) call: personable but business-like, they explained that the then quite new phenomenon of phone-snatching (this was four years ago, early December) was beginning to explode all over London, despite the usefulness of the “Find My Phone” app, but largely aided by the fact the British Police cannot easily obtain a search warrant of a property from the Judicial Authorities, due to the “garantista” nature of the British legal system.
Four years on, London – and more generally, Great Britain- have become the European capital for the theft of smartphones, Rolexes and luxury automobiles. According to the Met – the Metropolitan Police, which serves the Greater London area, which counts nearly 10 million registered inhabitants, and possibly as much as 1.5 million unregistered, illegals on top of that – there are now an estimated 80,000 “snatch thefts” (scippi) of mobile phones inside the M25 – the orbital motorway which runs round the outer limits of the metropolis.
According to the Met’s data, the incidence of phone snatching has tripled in the last four years – since I became an early victim of this alarming trend. The Met now publicize a decalogue of “do’s and don’ts” for smartphone owners. The same thing now applies to wearers of luxury brand watches, especially Rolexes, the Met advises wearers to wear them under their shirt cuff and not to consult it in a public place.. better still, they advise, leave it at home. Locked in a safe (una custodia a chiave). So far in 2025, an average of four Rolexes each day are ripped from their proud (and perhaps careless ) owners’ wrists in London: a total of 11,000 luxury brand watches worth at least Euro 3500 were stolen in the UK in 2022, including from luxury stores as well as from the owner’s wrists. And the general trend, above all in London, is an increase every year for luxury watch theft; unlike mobile phones, they don’t require recharging and they don’t have an IMEI security code which can block them from a distance.
Possibly even more acute is the crisis of stolen luxury automobiles in the UK, which according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is currently 130,000 vehicles a year nationwide, with at least 30,000 of them stolen in the London area. That number is increasing exponentially, a least by 75% over the last decade.
And it’s not just the usual Ranger Rovers, Land Rovers, BMW 3 Series, Mercedes C-Class, Bentleys & Porsches, but expensive farm equipment from the countryside as well. It is a real problem for British farmers, as they have never faced the need for high level security to protect their vehicles before.
So why the huge increase in car and farm equipment theft? British Crime analysts reckon that it is due to several compound factors, firstly the ease of exporting the stolen vehicles, both complete and dismantled into spare parts from the numerous container ports around the coastline of the United Kingdom, as well as the extremely low level of effective security checks at those ports, which are largely digitalized.
Secondly, the relative ease of “breaking into” high value cars, nearly all of which are opened & closed using a digital “key” the code to which can be easily cracked by tech-savvy thieves. To combat this growing trend of hacking into these “Open Sesame” devices, the Met now advice the owner of such high value cars to keep their key fobs away from doors and windows (through which the thieves can point their decoding devices) and even to buy a “Faraday Pouch” (custodia), a small sealable bag which is designed to refract any probing rays from hostile agents.
For obvious reasons, almost all the expensive cars and agricultural vehicles stolen end up being shipped abroad, mostly to countries in Africa, China, Vietnam & even the UAE. Some 25% of these cars end up being offloaded in the DRC (ex Zaire), (where the intercity road surfaces are lamentable) mostly to be sold on to eager buyers in other African countries.
According to the venerable military & geo-strategic research group the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), local & foreign vehicle thieves operating in the UK run almost no risk at all in being apprehended: the statistics regarding the British Police’s record at solving the crimes related to these vehicles is less than 5%. Unsurprisingly, the number of UK cars stolen has almost doubled over the last twelve years to 4.5% – leading to a eye-watering 45% rise in insurance premiums, whereas in the EU the corresponding rise in insurance costs is only in line with inflation.
In a recent well-researched article, provocatively entitled “Grand Theft Global”, (mirroring the super popular video game series “Grand Theft Auto”), the Economist dives deep into the murky Empire of International Crime, which very clearly numbers London as its Global Capital, it considers how come Britain -and more specifically London – is now the source of some 40% of stolen mobile phones for the whole of Europe, with a similar statistic regarding expensive wrist watches & automobiles.
Whilst the recent legislation targeting the very rich, enacted by the Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer over the last 18 months has predictably led to a “Billionaire Brain Drain” from London towards Geneva, the UAE and certain Caribbean Islands, leading to a worrying decline in the number of shops, restaurants & bars catering for the uber-rich, it appears that there are still enough Rolexes, Bentleys and iPhones in Europe’s most cosmopolitan metropolis to satisfy the greedy hands of the well organized theft networks – most of whose most talented operatives are not native Britons – thus guaranteeing that at least in this specialized field, the UK leads the rest of Europe.
