It’s horrible and it’s happened to me but it’s difficult to see how it can be stopped, though.
You just have to be very careful with your phone in public places.
Karen_Is_ASlur on
Yes, it’s horrible and they are utter cunts… but just don’t walk down the street waving your phone out in front of you, head down, oblivious to who might be approaching. I see so many people like this every day and it makes easy pickings for the thieving bastards.
StagnantMonk on
Once upon a time the general public would help and assist
Now I hear people shouting oi..it’s not your business.. you can’t do that?! Let them go man just accept it…WHY?! If any crime wave began around you.. wouldn’t you want to stop it?
jodrellbank_pants on
phones are to easy to unlock, and people walk around like zombies glued to their phones and unaware of their surrounding.
Worldly_Table_5092 on
Well maybe if there was repercussions it would stop rising. Hire me chief, let me chase criminals with my beaty stick
[deleted] on
[removed]
bitch_fitching on
The police could set up some stings, surveillance, find where the phones are going. If the phones are going abroad, charge the couriers. If the phones are being used here, charge the recipients.
A lot of crime is not being punished because the people committing it are poor and many, just rotating in and out of prison. Stop the economics and the ring leaders, the crime stops.
The problem is that it would cost money, police would need to be competent and trained. The costs of not doing anything to stop crime, is probably much greater. Be a soft touch, and that emboldens criminal gangs.
fucking-nonsense on
> the unstoppable rise
“No Way To Prevent This”, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
RaymondBumcheese on
One thing they don’t mention is that quite often someone from a factory in china will contact you pretending to have bought your stolen phone and saying they can still see your bank details on it so you need to remove it from ‘find my’ so they can wipe it.
Don’t do that. It means they can resell it for full value. If you ignore them they have to just strip it for parts for much less money.
It’s a little thing but we have to make it less lucrative.
NoRecipe3350 on
Yes it’s horrible, had a phone stolen (not from a bike) and basically lost contact with some people I’d met fairly recently (I was travelling) that I’d consider keeping as long term friends. Couldn’t recover any data from the messenger app. Furthermore I was messaging them every few days, then just stopped out of the blue.
Boomers and their address/phone number books were pretty right.
ShermyTheCat on
LET’S JUST ALL AGREE THAT WEARING A LITTLE WRIST STRAP IS REALLY COOL
thermosifounas on
The amount of victim blaming in this thread is unreal. Practically one step away from “she was looking for it, she was wearing a mini skirt and crop top”
People should be allowed to buy, use and enjoy expensive things in public. The idea of a mobile phone is to…well…be mobile.
Yes, opportunistic criminals have existed since the dawn of time and common sense is useful.
But to reach the rates that it has at this stage, is a complete failure of the state that simply hasn’t recognised or, to the extent it has, addressed the problem.
Everything else is cheap regressive excuses.
FeralSquirrels on
Well, perhaps if the Police as a career was given some teeth in terms of decent pay, pension and motivations to join _and_ the Government put a vested interest in ensuring they were funded properly and _not_ used as a political tool every 5 minutes _then_ they’d be in a position to do something.
However it’s not a case of “unstoppable” and more a question of _how_ can it be stopped – you can’t nick everyone on a bike, but if someone _does_ make off on one, we all know there’ll be an immediate “well sh*t if we chase on a car, remember what happened _last_ time” because you need to determine what’s “acceptable force” before someone’s wee laddies come acropper and end up on the front page of tabloids.
There’s ways and means, it just means that the repurcussions of committing crime mean that yes, there’s a risk that being apprehended and held to account for those crimes may incur the penalty of “if you keep legging it when demanded to stop, you’ll be _made_ to stop”.
OP1KenOP on
We should be fucking raging about this. The unstoppable rose of motorcycle, phone and cycle theft in plain sight while working classes pay more and more tax, and yet billionaire (corp etc) taxes remain fixed is a joke.
On top of that, they still find plenty of money to buy bus lane cameras, congestion cameras, pay for TV license enforcement, pay parking attendants and of course – buy and maintain speed cameras.
Given that vandalism in plain sight is no longer enough of a crime for them to care about – why don’t we just vandalise parking meters, speed cameras, congestion and bus lane cams in protest?
It might actually wake them up to policing vandalism and theft if it’s hitting the government’s coffers.
fishandbanana on
Forget wearing something like the meta smart glasses in the future. we will have to alter our electroning purchases based on theft rate in the country.
Ebeneezer_G00de on
I w0nDeR wHy tHeY d0n’T hAvE sNaTcH tHefTs iN RiyaDh oR DubAi?
UCthrowaway78404 on
I never been phone snatched but I hate these bikes riding 15mph+ on pavement
frogstarB on
We live in an area with kids on those fast e-bikes and I always wondered if they’re part of this nuisance. sure enough, police came and rounded them up a few weeks ago and confiscated their bikes.
Might not seem like much for anyone who’s already lost their phone but it was good to see the police are trying to catch these perps !
woody83060 on
I think mossad should provide the security features on all phones.
MDK1980 on
Remember an interview I saw with one of the gang leaders. What he said was so blatantly obvious, but no-one seems to ever have caught on. Basically, he said that if you had £1200 cash on your person, you’d make sure you kept it out of sight. You wouldn’t walk around with it in your hand, waving it around, and you definitely wouldn’t leave it lying on a table out in the open in a coffee shop while you were distracted talking to your mate.
parkway_parkway on
I blame the NIMBY’s, they’ve literally ruined everything and if life were cheaper it would be much easier to convince people just to work a normal job and buy what they want to have.
MachineHot3089 on
All very well all the demand for proactive policing in this thread, yet a lot of proactive cops get thrown under the bus at the earliest opportunity.
Daveindenmark on
Where are all these phones going, who’s buying them, and who’s behind what seems to be this organised crime.?
As for giving them 5 years. That’s just wishful thinking, they need bigger consequences, if I had my way I would suggest we jail the parents and siblings, sieze any property they may have and if they live in a council house black list them. So, if you steel, everyone you love or might care about will be punished. But that’s just a crazy idea.
unbelievablydull82 on
I keep trying to warn my son about this when he’s out on his own, taking pics of London. He’s 17, but autistic, and is pretty good out, but street smarts aren’t his strength yet.
50YrOldNoviceGymMan on
May Apple should embed an always on air tag into it’s phones ?
ICanOnlyPickOne on
It happened to me a few weeks ago and I’m a 100kg Bodybuilder. The guy who snatched it didn’t fit the description of what you would think either. He was a tall thin European looking chap who looked like he just finished work in one of the big banks and was cycling home. I was livid.
GamerGuyAlly on
Start treating phone theft as a serious crime, actually fund our police forces and stop tying their hands behind their backs when dealing with criminals.
The whole of society needs to change the way it looks at police, and we need a better way of helping out the needy who turn to crime to fund their lifestyles.
Delicious_Opposite55 on
To prevent your phone being stolen, simply cover it in razorblades and dogshit.
cookiesnooper on
” the unstoppable…” thus is what happens when crime has no punishment
drempire on
I never realised before that some people don’t know what victim blaming is. Just seems to be thrown around like when people call someone a pedo for no reason. Has things always been like this or did social media do it?
NomadFallGame on
Oh yeah, the issue that was always in the UK. Because nothing changed in the last few years.
0Neverland0 on
>Jenny Tian, 29, a comedian from Australia, had been in London for two weeks when she saw a group of guys in ski masks on a street in east London. “I thought to myself: ‘They’re probably on their way to rob a home, they’re not going to bother me.’” It was 5pm, still broad daylight, and she had her phone out, trying to find a venue on Google Maps. “You know when you’re turning yourself into a human compass, pivoting around, trying to work out where it’s sending you? I looked very lost, I guess.” The next thing she heard was the sound of running, then a whoosh of air, and her phone was gone.
So she’s sees a group of masked criminals and makes no effort to evade them or protect her valuables. Dumb.
Sea-Caterpillar-255 on
I was assaulted about 5 years back. It’s a bit of a long story but broadly football yob (aggressive) and mates (who didn’t want a fight) started a fight with a group I was part of. Standard Friday night drunken wanker stuff.
It happened at Liverpool Street station. Multiple CCTV cameras, public witnesses, station staff witnesses etc.
It came out at the police interview that the guy who started it had been arrested 33 times for street violence.
He wasn’t charged because what’s the point?
I think most people don’t realize just how serious (or politically verboten) crime has to be for it to lead to punishment. At least punishment that affects someone who doesn’t care about being able to get a job that requires a clean record…
I expect sooner or later the main instigator will kill someone. Or get himself killed. Then it will be a huge court case and crying widows/mother’s statements and ringing if hands…
Human_Shop_2428 on
To be clear, we no longer live in a high trust society. It’s going to get a LOT worse as well.
LonelyStranger8467 on
Stop and search anyone on an electric bike wearing all black. Especially those wearing balaclavas.
fhdhsu on
Violent crime is not a mysterious phenomenon. That’s only something you’re told by academics who want more funding for more absurd p-hacked, file drawer affected studies.
No. It’s unbelievably simple. We know exactly who’s going to commit violent crime in the future. They’re the ones who have done it in past.
And this is made even more absurd by the fact that whilst 46 is an insane number, we know that the majority of their criminality goes unpunished. This study found for every one police contact, criminal youths self-reported 25 fucking offences. And that’s just police contact. Who knows how much higher the fucking number is for every convictions? It’s in the 100’s.
The truth is we’ve built a system where an absolute minority of the population are such prolific offenders to the point of incredulity.
And the truth is we know what happens when they’re removed from the equation.
Perfect [example](https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/when-few-do-great-harm), when only THREE criminals (with 200 conviction total) died in a police chase in Ireland and as a result the burglary rate absolutely plummeted.
An insanely, positive result for the general public right?
Charged with endangerment of life because 3 scumbags he chased were driving down the wrong side of the road.
At some point you just have to accept that the people’s biggest enemy is the state. And the absolute refusal of it to what needs to be done.
Because it’s very fucking obvious what needs to be done.
We could lock up 100,000 scumbags and live in a genuine paradise. Genuine Shan-gri-la.
Somewhere you would never have to be afraid of being victimised ever again.
But the truth is our system puts above the right for the 100,000 violent scumbags to victimise who they want, over the right for 70 million innocent, law-abiding citizens to live a safe life, to not be victimised.
In here comes the cope about – “where are we going to put all these criminals – there’s no prisons”, “you have to look at socioeconomic factors” etc. etc.
Ruhail_56 on
The way to deal with this is to allow the person who’s a victim of these crimes to track these people down and violently hurt them and put the fear of their life in them.
avl0 on
Can’t steal a phone if you don’t have any hands.
I’m just saying.
AtrocityBuffer on
Just lace your phone in horrible lethal toxic poison and tiny barbs and wear a glove when you use it bam, phone thieves get what they deserve and you’re less likely to be on your phone all the time!
Foxp_ro300 on
That’s why I don’t take my phone out that much these days.
Any-Wall2929 on
There would probably be a rise in wallet thefts if most people walked around with £400-1200 in cash at all times and frequently held their wallets out in the open. A large part of the cause is probably related to the value of many phones.
41 Comments
It’s horrible and it’s happened to me but it’s difficult to see how it can be stopped, though.
You just have to be very careful with your phone in public places.
Yes, it’s horrible and they are utter cunts… but just don’t walk down the street waving your phone out in front of you, head down, oblivious to who might be approaching. I see so many people like this every day and it makes easy pickings for the thieving bastards.
Once upon a time the general public would help and assist
Now I hear people shouting oi..it’s not your business.. you can’t do that?! Let them go man just accept it…WHY?! If any crime wave began around you.. wouldn’t you want to stop it?
phones are to easy to unlock, and people walk around like zombies glued to their phones and unaware of their surrounding.
Well maybe if there was repercussions it would stop rising. Hire me chief, let me chase criminals with my beaty stick
[removed]
The police could set up some stings, surveillance, find where the phones are going. If the phones are going abroad, charge the couriers. If the phones are being used here, charge the recipients.
A lot of crime is not being punished because the people committing it are poor and many, just rotating in and out of prison. Stop the economics and the ring leaders, the crime stops.
The problem is that it would cost money, police would need to be competent and trained. The costs of not doing anything to stop crime, is probably much greater. Be a soft touch, and that emboldens criminal gangs.
> the unstoppable rise
“No Way To Prevent This”, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
One thing they don’t mention is that quite often someone from a factory in china will contact you pretending to have bought your stolen phone and saying they can still see your bank details on it so you need to remove it from ‘find my’ so they can wipe it.
Don’t do that. It means they can resell it for full value. If you ignore them they have to just strip it for parts for much less money.
It’s a little thing but we have to make it less lucrative.
Yes it’s horrible, had a phone stolen (not from a bike) and basically lost contact with some people I’d met fairly recently (I was travelling) that I’d consider keeping as long term friends. Couldn’t recover any data from the messenger app. Furthermore I was messaging them every few days, then just stopped out of the blue.
Boomers and their address/phone number books were pretty right.
LET’S JUST ALL AGREE THAT WEARING A LITTLE WRIST STRAP IS REALLY COOL
The amount of victim blaming in this thread is unreal. Practically one step away from “she was looking for it, she was wearing a mini skirt and crop top”
People should be allowed to buy, use and enjoy expensive things in public. The idea of a mobile phone is to…well…be mobile.
Yes, opportunistic criminals have existed since the dawn of time and common sense is useful.
But to reach the rates that it has at this stage, is a complete failure of the state that simply hasn’t recognised or, to the extent it has, addressed the problem.
Everything else is cheap regressive excuses.
Well, perhaps if the Police as a career was given some teeth in terms of decent pay, pension and motivations to join _and_ the Government put a vested interest in ensuring they were funded properly and _not_ used as a political tool every 5 minutes _then_ they’d be in a position to do something.
However it’s not a case of “unstoppable” and more a question of _how_ can it be stopped – you can’t nick everyone on a bike, but if someone _does_ make off on one, we all know there’ll be an immediate “well sh*t if we chase on a car, remember what happened _last_ time” because you need to determine what’s “acceptable force” before someone’s wee laddies come acropper and end up on the front page of tabloids.
There’s ways and means, it just means that the repurcussions of committing crime mean that yes, there’s a risk that being apprehended and held to account for those crimes may incur the penalty of “if you keep legging it when demanded to stop, you’ll be _made_ to stop”.
We should be fucking raging about this. The unstoppable rose of motorcycle, phone and cycle theft in plain sight while working classes pay more and more tax, and yet billionaire (corp etc) taxes remain fixed is a joke.
On top of that, they still find plenty of money to buy bus lane cameras, congestion cameras, pay for TV license enforcement, pay parking attendants and of course – buy and maintain speed cameras.
Given that vandalism in plain sight is no longer enough of a crime for them to care about – why don’t we just vandalise parking meters, speed cameras, congestion and bus lane cams in protest?
It might actually wake them up to policing vandalism and theft if it’s hitting the government’s coffers.
Forget wearing something like the meta smart glasses in the future. we will have to alter our electroning purchases based on theft rate in the country.
I w0nDeR wHy tHeY d0n’T hAvE sNaTcH tHefTs iN RiyaDh oR DubAi?
I never been phone snatched but I hate these bikes riding 15mph+ on pavement
We live in an area with kids on those fast e-bikes and I always wondered if they’re part of this nuisance. sure enough, police came and rounded them up a few weeks ago and confiscated their bikes.
Might not seem like much for anyone who’s already lost their phone but it was good to see the police are trying to catch these perps !
I think mossad should provide the security features on all phones.
Remember an interview I saw with one of the gang leaders. What he said was so blatantly obvious, but no-one seems to ever have caught on. Basically, he said that if you had £1200 cash on your person, you’d make sure you kept it out of sight. You wouldn’t walk around with it in your hand, waving it around, and you definitely wouldn’t leave it lying on a table out in the open in a coffee shop while you were distracted talking to your mate.
I blame the NIMBY’s, they’ve literally ruined everything and if life were cheaper it would be much easier to convince people just to work a normal job and buy what they want to have.
All very well all the demand for proactive policing in this thread, yet a lot of proactive cops get thrown under the bus at the earliest opportunity.
Where are all these phones going, who’s buying them, and who’s behind what seems to be this organised crime.?
As for giving them 5 years. That’s just wishful thinking, they need bigger consequences, if I had my way I would suggest we jail the parents and siblings, sieze any property they may have and if they live in a council house black list them. So, if you steel, everyone you love or might care about will be punished. But that’s just a crazy idea.
I keep trying to warn my son about this when he’s out on his own, taking pics of London. He’s 17, but autistic, and is pretty good out, but street smarts aren’t his strength yet.
May Apple should embed an always on air tag into it’s phones ?
It happened to me a few weeks ago and I’m a 100kg Bodybuilder. The guy who snatched it didn’t fit the description of what you would think either. He was a tall thin European looking chap who looked like he just finished work in one of the big banks and was cycling home. I was livid.
Start treating phone theft as a serious crime, actually fund our police forces and stop tying their hands behind their backs when dealing with criminals.
The whole of society needs to change the way it looks at police, and we need a better way of helping out the needy who turn to crime to fund their lifestyles.
To prevent your phone being stolen, simply cover it in razorblades and dogshit.
” the unstoppable…” thus is what happens when crime has no punishment
I never realised before that some people don’t know what victim blaming is. Just seems to be thrown around like when people call someone a pedo for no reason. Has things always been like this or did social media do it?
Oh yeah, the issue that was always in the UK. Because nothing changed in the last few years.
>Jenny Tian, 29, a comedian from Australia, had been in London for two weeks when she saw a group of guys in ski masks on a street in east London. “I thought to myself: ‘They’re probably on their way to rob a home, they’re not going to bother me.’” It was 5pm, still broad daylight, and she had her phone out, trying to find a venue on Google Maps. “You know when you’re turning yourself into a human compass, pivoting around, trying to work out where it’s sending you? I looked very lost, I guess.” The next thing she heard was the sound of running, then a whoosh of air, and her phone was gone.
So she’s sees a group of masked criminals and makes no effort to evade them or protect her valuables. Dumb.
I was assaulted about 5 years back. It’s a bit of a long story but broadly football yob (aggressive) and mates (who didn’t want a fight) started a fight with a group I was part of. Standard Friday night drunken wanker stuff.
It happened at Liverpool Street station. Multiple CCTV cameras, public witnesses, station staff witnesses etc.
It came out at the police interview that the guy who started it had been arrested 33 times for street violence.
He wasn’t charged because what’s the point?
I think most people don’t realize just how serious (or politically verboten) crime has to be for it to lead to punishment. At least punishment that affects someone who doesn’t care about being able to get a job that requires a clean record…
I expect sooner or later the main instigator will kill someone. Or get himself killed. Then it will be a huge court case and crying widows/mother’s statements and ringing if hands…
To be clear, we no longer live in a high trust society. It’s going to get a LOT worse as well.
Stop and search anyone on an electric bike wearing all black. Especially those wearing balaclavas.
Violent crime is not a mysterious phenomenon. That’s only something you’re told by academics who want more funding for more absurd p-hacked, file drawer affected studies.
No. It’s unbelievably simple. We know exactly who’s going to commit violent crime in the future. They’re the ones who have done it in past.
Effectively all crime now is recidivism.
You could eliminate [50](https://x.com/artemisconsort/status/1843726715933339776?s=46)% of all crime with a 3 strike law.
This is possible because someone being sentenced to prison is now more likely to have [46](https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/whogoestoprison.pdf) or more previous cautions than they are to be a first time offender.
And this is made even more absurd by the fact that whilst 46 is an insane number, we know that the majority of their criminality goes unpunished. This study found for every one police contact, criminal youths self-reported 25 fucking offences. And that’s just police contact. Who knows how much higher the fucking number is for every convictions? It’s in the 100’s.
The truth is we’ve built a system where an absolute minority of the population are such prolific offenders to the point of incredulity.
And the truth is we know what happens when they’re removed from the equation.
Perfect [example](https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/when-few-do-great-harm), when only THREE criminals (with 200 conviction total) died in a police chase in Ireland and as a result the burglary rate absolutely plummeted.
An insanely, positive result for the general public right?
But you know what happened, instead of being humbled by the fact that for once, the system has actually inadvertently protected the public, what they did was fucking [charge](https://www.thejournal.ie/garda-sent-for-trial-n7-crash-where-three-died-6419507-Jun2024/) the officer who was chasing them.
Charged with endangerment of life because 3 scumbags he chased were driving down the wrong side of the road.
At some point you just have to accept that the people’s biggest enemy is the state. And the absolute refusal of it to what needs to be done.
Because it’s very fucking obvious what needs to be done.
We could lock up 100,000 scumbags and live in a genuine paradise. Genuine Shan-gri-la.
Somewhere you would never have to be afraid of being victimised ever again.
But the truth is our system puts above the right for the 100,000 violent scumbags to victimise who they want, over the right for 70 million innocent, law-abiding citizens to live a safe life, to not be victimised.
In here comes the cope about – “where are we going to put all these criminals – there’s no prisons”, “you have to look at socioeconomic factors” etc. etc.
The way to deal with this is to allow the person who’s a victim of these crimes to track these people down and violently hurt them and put the fear of their life in them.
Can’t steal a phone if you don’t have any hands.
I’m just saying.
Just lace your phone in horrible lethal toxic poison and tiny barbs and wear a glove when you use it bam, phone thieves get what they deserve and you’re less likely to be on your phone all the time!
That’s why I don’t take my phone out that much these days.
There would probably be a rise in wallet thefts if most people walked around with £400-1200 in cash at all times and frequently held their wallets out in the open. A large part of the cause is probably related to the value of many phones.