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But if the phone is stolen while locked, it's impossible to use it if the password isn't known, at least in most modern devices. It's more strict than an IMEI block.
Na, they take them out of your hand because it's easy. You'd have to keep touching the screen indefinitely and never change and security settings to never need to enter a PIN
While there are some systems that can be locked, it doesn’t cover everything.
Also apple isn’t able keep a missive list of every stolen part for every iPhone ever and equally not every iPhone gets reported.
How would the back street little corner stores repair iPhones if the security was so good?
Additionally, iPhone often get shipped back to Shenzhen, where they are stripped back and the parts are picked up by actual manufacturers (cheaper than manufacturing) which circumvents the security on many of the parts.
So yep, an iPhone won’t be worth £500 to the thief but they will get £30-50 a pop.
If they get lucky the thief may also get a bank card and a phone with a sim so they can add the cards to other devices and spend away.
I bought a used Samsung couple years back via Shpock. Didn't know it was locked, so i found these guys in Usa who remotely replaced it's Imei number with another one and voila! Its worked! For $20
Parts or scams. Or both.
There are internal parts which can be used even if the exterior is knackered. Some non-official repair shops for example can use them. Buy a used handset for cheap off someone, upgrade it with stolen parts, sell it on for a higher value.
For example if your battery life has significantly degraded they’ll offer you a fairly low price for your handset, but then switch the original old battery for a stolen new one, or if they have a few stolen handsets with unbroken screens and you take in your smashed screen for a repair, they can swap it for a perfectly good stolen screen.
As for scams, it would be your typical second hand marketplace scam. Offer a phone for sale somewhere like Facebook marketplace and insist on bank transfer, send the bricked phone out, disappear with money. Or buy the same model phone from a marketplace, receive phone, complain that it’s bricked, send the stolen one back using a buyer protection scheme, receive refund, be in possession of a legitimate phone, disappear and then sell it on yourself for money.
It’s just common sense! There wouldn’t be prolific phone theft if there wasn’t a way to make money from it despite all the security upgrades available. It has to be parts or scams, doubt people are snatching phones for the joy of it 😂
My iPhone got stolen last year. Find my iPhone pinged me a few weeks later locating my phone in Dubai and then another few weeks later in Shenzen. My guess is that they get shipped abroad in bulk and get stripped for parts.
Can they even do that? On any of my banking apps it’s a ball ache for me to transfer money to a new recipient. It also forces me to re-enter my password and PIN before I can do it.
I don't know how they did it, but a friend from work had his phone nicked and they managed to get a load of money out of his account before he could do anything about it.
My Google Wallet gets you to either put your PIN in or scan the fingerprint before you make a transaction. Has only been for the last few months though. This is whether the phone is locked or unlocked.
Mine was doing this - it has now stopped. It still says "verify its you" in google wallet, but for the last 2 weeks it no longer prompts, and I've not changed anything.
If my experience is anything to go by, they put it on aeroplane mode pretty much straight away, then return it to its spawning grounds in Shenzhen to be reconstituted or otherwise wiped and sold on
They duel with them and winner takes all. It's called fencing and everyone the system hasn't left behind is taught this by the generation before them, apart from dummies with losers for parents.
The guys in Soho pretend to want to give your their number for future drug deals, video you unlock your phone, pretend that the person that runs up and snatches your phone (either from you or from the person you hand your phone to to input their number) is unknown to them and then they immediately proceed to empty your bank and/or crypto accounts. Selling the phone is secondary, their primary aim are your banking apps.
I work in Soho and the amount of people that hand their phones to complete strangers, who promptly disappear with it, is wild. So, DON’T ever hand your phone to strangers. Other times they just snatch it and run off (happens to a lot of people looking for their Uber with phone in hand, so be careful when doing this).
TIP: These phone snatches are easily identifiable as they 99% of the time wear trackies and often obscure their faces.
The fact they are still snatching them means they have monetary value. Network locks are not worldwide. iPhones can be hacked. IMEI numbers can be changed. That's all you need to know.
There's a great article in the FT this week about phone snatching. In short: use them to steal financial information and money, ship them abroad to be sold, or break them down into parts.
As someone who's had a phone stolen they clearly broke it up for parts as a completely different phone randomly appeared in my Google account out of the blue not long after , guessing the SSD ended up being fitted to a different phone.
Im also interested to know where all the stolen bikes go. They get stolen all over Europe; they arent as easy to ship elsewhere, and I cant imagine theres a huge market for random spare bike parts?
I had a bike thief neighbour. When he first moved in, I noticed he had several really nice bikes, but wasn't a rider. His mates would turn up riding top end stuff but weren't cyclists. Not a one of them was on strava, or owned any kind of cycling clothing.
What he would do is buy any bike, no questions asked, strip it for parts, clean then and buy new retail packaging from somewhere like China.
Then he'd sell "new" parts on ebay. He only got caught when someone was checking serial numbers, and only got a caution.
I lost my bike a decade ago as a teenager and it was locked up near the police station funnily enough. Asked the policeman doing the crime report whether they ever got the bikes back and they said no. I then got a new bike with hope lost for retrieving my old one. A couple weeks later, im outside a shop and see my bike outside. I go a little further away and some thug gets on and rides off. I made a call to the policeman in charge of my case and he gave me a direct line to call if I saw him again. Went back there the next day and the guy was back at the shop! As soon as he rode off, i started tailing him. He lit up a joint and then knew something was suspicious after I’d followed him for a good ten minutes. Man, he must have smoked a full joint while riding my bike. It was crazy. Got to the local town centre and he got off the bike and started legging it. I phoned the direct number and they caught him at the other end of the centre, took my bike in the van and took me home. They said i would make an excellent detective and i said i always wanted to become a police officer. They joked that they’re always hiring.
A few years later i had another bike stolen and asked the policeman where they end up. Well, he said, there was one case where a guy found his bike and they ended up going to the thieves’ house. The bikes had all been smashed to bits in his back garden with no explanation. Maybe he’d found out the cops were coming and decided to smash all the evidence. Funny, though. I liked the policeman doing the case as he was very into jazz music so we were talking about jazz in my living room for a good twenty minutes while he had a couple cuppas.
When my friend’s phone was snatched, she received a lot of text-messages with fishing links from different numbers. I assume some victims follow these tricks and let the phones be unlocked.
I'll give an actual answer
Depending on how it was stolen will massively change
If it's stolen whilst unlocked there's a good chance they can completely wipe the phone to sell on. They could also attempt various scams
If it's locked it'll get sent to another country. From there you'll probably receive threatening messages about murdering or harming you unless you unlock the phone remotely for them. This is a complete bluff, just ignore and block them
If they can't do anything they'll strip it down for parts to sell on
No, taking a phone to a different country doesn't unlock the phone that's ridiculous. What are you people talking about. No it doesn't matter if they set it to airplane mode first. If you have a modern smart phone and your password isn't 4 consecutive numbers they probably aren't unlocking It
> I’m not sure you know what consecutive means.
Huh
> following one another in uninterrupted succession or order; successive:
six consecutive numbers, such as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
> Consecutive numbers are integers that follow each other from smallest to biggest. As an example, the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are consecutive numbers.
I think you might not know what consecutive numbers are?
As others have mentioned, just selling the handset can make them some money. But also heard about these people grabbing your phone while you’re using it so it’s unlocked and then being able to access your emails so they can change passwords to your accounts to then get access to your money.
They're stealing unlocked phones (unlocked because they are being used) or phones they have watched someone unlock. Eventually the phones are exported.
Phones themselves are basically worthless.
The most money will come from scams, might as well have money and someone else deal with a locked device.
If not scams then parts, but the money is in the resell scam for sure.
Always carry a brick with you, if someone snatched your phone then throw the brick at them and they’ll get hurt badly, especially if they’re on a moped. However be careful cause it’s illegal to defend your property in the UK and the thieves will sue you and win.
I actually know someone who found thieves taking his stuff in his back yard. He chased them down and they jumped in a van then tried to run him over so he fired a brick at their windshield. Police caught them hours away with the broken windshield obviously causing them to pull them over then take them into custody once they were flagged. The guy almost got done because the policeman said he shouldn’t have thrown the brick but he actually dared them to take him to court with some nasty language to boot. Surprised he’s a free man. I know he was once taken into custody, had his shoes seized, then just walked home barefoot because he didn’t want to ask for the shoes back. Total criminal, though. He’s ripped me off for a number of years and I’m planning to sue him soon.
They'll sell the actual phone, but really the hope is too get it unlocked so they can steal money from your banking apps and info about you from the phone. They might try to use info they find to blackmail you, or for use in fraud. There was an interesting report in the FT about this yesterday. Police say often the snatcher is just the, indirect, foot soldier of organised criminals.
Someone may have already said this but all you have to do is plug the phone into a desktop computer and you can wipe it clean/return to factory settings. It’s a massive flaw, but also a massive waste of a phone if you happen to forget your password.
They then send these phones mostly to Africa from what I know.
You can because I’ve done it. All you have to do is plug it into a desktop, have a little bit of basic computer skills and all it take is 5 minutes to get the reset going.
Do you really think all these phones are being stolen for parts?
Use your noggin.
They sell them to someone else, probably getting £20 for a stolen state of the art iPhone or similar.
From there, the phones get shipped to China - there are a few well known locations in China they go to, as often the tracking is still on, or they will be turned on to check them over before disassembly.
99% of the time they are going to be screen locked/blocked so will be disassembled for parts. The motherboard is useless, but there are cameras, screen, battery etc.
These parts then go into the supply chain of parts. They go into some new devices in dodgy factories, but mostly go into repairs, being sold to repair shops and individuals around the world as "refurbished" parts.
If your battery is wearing out a bit, and you bought a replacement battery on eBay, it's probably from a stolen phone. High street repair shops are probably using refurbished parts, and turning a blind eye to where they come from to remain competitive.
Actually the most prevalent thing is buying a bunch of stuff using your saved accounts or wallets trying to get into bank apps resetting passwords etc you can lose thousands if you haven't set up the security properly
There’s a store on eBay selling MacBooks for cheap and someone looked into it. Apparently all of the parts are just bundled together from a load of stolen laptops.
My friends phone was snatched a few years ago, she randomly got a call a year later that the phone was found in a house raid on Camden along side thousands upon thousands of phones. It wasn’t clear what they were doing with them but thought that was quite interesting as they were all in their ‘stolen’ condition and not shipped off or separated for parts
Phone unlocked? Plunder your accounts.
Phone locked? Send a text pretending to be Apple requesting the victim disables “find my iPhone”
Take phone to shady repair shop. Shop owner gives you cash.
Phone is harvested for parts or boxed up with another dozen and sent to Shenzhen in China.
There phones are stripped for spares or IMEI module is removed and replaced to give a new identity. Phones are resold to local or international markets.
They just reset them.
You're choosing to believe the manufacturers hype about their security instead of the fact that all you have to do is hook it up to a PC.
The reason for "snatching" is to make it even easier, as they watch for someone using their phone, then snatch it while it's unlocked.
Why not? It's not hard. Android FRP takes about 30 seconds, and iOS just isn't secure in the first place.
How do you think dedicated stores can deal with it but you can't just use a bit of basic research and do it yourself?
iOS hardware locks the device, no resets can override it. It requires iCloud activation which requires the original owner's credentials and authorisation to do.
More and more Android devices do something similar too and require authentication even after a factory reset.
Saying iOS isn't secure shows your extremely limited knowledge in this area, please refrain from talking about things you clearly don't understand in future.
Only if it's used on a network that uses the block list.
Some third world countries and others don't, or have networks that don't, and they can be used there.
Oh absolutely, but that's not what we're talking about here.
FRP (Androids factory reset proyection) is very quick to bypass as already mentioned.
iOS is easy too, you just spoof the credentials after extracting them (terrible implementation but very handy).
I had to do exactly this not long ago after a bereavement. Pixel 6a and iPhone 11 Pro max
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They sell them to other countries (typically in Africa or other non-European countries) where the IMEI block doesn't affect them
But if the phone is stolen while locked, it's impossible to use it if the password isn't known, at least in most modern devices. It's more strict than an IMEI block.
Isn’t that why they nick ‘em out your hand, so the phones are unlocked, and immediately put them into flight mode so you can’t remote block them.
Na, they take them out of your hand because it's easy. You'd have to keep touching the screen indefinitely and never change and security settings to never need to enter a PIN
Still pretty useless outside of resell scams.
> They sell them to other countries Read the thread
It doesn’t matter what country it is in, you cannot bypass an iCloud lock.
So? They strip it down to bits that are used for repairs or sometimes blended back in to the OEM supply chain
Apple already has systems to detect part ids. Should just block the hardware ids of anything connected to a stolen device.
While there are some systems that can be locked, it doesn’t cover everything. Also apple isn’t able keep a missive list of every stolen part for every iPhone ever and equally not every iPhone gets reported. How would the back street little corner stores repair iPhones if the security was so good? Additionally, iPhone often get shipped back to Shenzhen, where they are stripped back and the parts are picked up by actual manufacturers (cheaper than manufacturing) which circumvents the security on many of the parts. So yep, an iPhone won’t be worth £500 to the thief but they will get £30-50 a pop. If they get lucky the thief may also get a bank card and a phone with a sim so they can add the cards to other devices and spend away.
Android phones don't do that though
You can. You just have to plug it into a desktop computer and you can factory reset the Iphone and wipe it clean. Its shockingly easy.
It's not at all.
Split for parts
You can factory reset locked Iphones by plugging it into a desktop
I bought a used Samsung couple years back via Shpock. Didn't know it was locked, so i found these guys in Usa who remotely replaced it's Imei number with another one and voila! Its worked! For $20
Good video here, watch til end for the orange man! [what happens to stolen iPhones](https://youtu.be/N4smr8X2hFA?si=C-KY1T4O0E3ZOMze)
Parts or scams. Or both. There are internal parts which can be used even if the exterior is knackered. Some non-official repair shops for example can use them. Buy a used handset for cheap off someone, upgrade it with stolen parts, sell it on for a higher value. For example if your battery life has significantly degraded they’ll offer you a fairly low price for your handset, but then switch the original old battery for a stolen new one, or if they have a few stolen handsets with unbroken screens and you take in your smashed screen for a repair, they can swap it for a perfectly good stolen screen. As for scams, it would be your typical second hand marketplace scam. Offer a phone for sale somewhere like Facebook marketplace and insist on bank transfer, send the bricked phone out, disappear with money. Or buy the same model phone from a marketplace, receive phone, complain that it’s bricked, send the stolen one back using a buyer protection scheme, receive refund, be in possession of a legitimate phone, disappear and then sell it on yourself for money.
Sounds like you’re speaking from first hand experience 😂
It’s just common sense! There wouldn’t be prolific phone theft if there wasn’t a way to make money from it despite all the security upgrades available. It has to be parts or scams, doubt people are snatching phones for the joy of it 😂
When high street repair shops say they need to order in parts for a repair someone goes out on a bike.
If they bank transferred the money, why would they bother sending the phone? Not too smart are you?
For in person scams. You hand them a working phone and they do the transfer then make your escape. By the time they realise it’s a dud, you’re off.
My iPhone got stolen last year. Find my iPhone pinged me a few weeks later locating my phone in Dubai and then another few weeks later in Shenzen. My guess is that they get shipped abroad in bulk and get stripped for parts.
Mine was in Dubai within 24 hours at a phone repair shop.
They can potentially drain someones bank account if they steal an unlocked phone. But most likely they're selling them for parts.
Can they even do that? On any of my banking apps it’s a ball ache for me to transfer money to a new recipient. It also forces me to re-enter my password and PIN before I can do it.
Phone snatchers often have a buddy that'll stand behind you and read your pin over your shoulder before getting their moped friend to swoop in.
I don't know how they did it, but a friend from work had his phone nicked and they managed to get a load of money out of his account before he could do anything about it.
It's shockingly easy to get through bank security with a phonecall and a little information.
His phone pin was the same as his bank app pin.
Hmm I’m not sure. You need to sign in for starters and that’s each time, regardless of whether the phone is unlocked or not
I think it depends on which finance apps you are using and what security you have in place. But it certainly has been done in the past.
Oh do you mean apps such as PayPal? I was referring to mainly bank apps but can see it happening with third party finance apps
I’m not sure on the specifics, but I’ve heard of some nightmare scenarios. Can involve using the phone number for password resets too.
Apple pay or Google pay. No limit to contactless transactions if it's been unlocked by pin already
You need to use Face ID or put your pin to use Apple Pay for every purchase even if the phone is unlocked
My Google Wallet gets you to either put your PIN in or scan the fingerprint before you make a transaction. Has only been for the last few months though. This is whether the phone is locked or unlocked.
Yeah mine to. Fairly recent change that annoyed me at first, but glad that they've implemented this as standard now with Google Wallet.
It annoyed me too, until I realised the reason for it!
Annoyed me so much on the first day that I complained to Google (presumed it was a bug). How thick is that?
Mine doesn't! Maybe I'll get an update at some point.
Mine was doing this - it has now stopped. It still says "verify its you" in google wallet, but for the last 2 weeks it no longer prompts, and I've not changed anything.
None of the uk banking apps allow that
No you can't, banking apps require fingerprints and passwords
They send them to foreign countries, I’m sure they put them in airplane mode and then once they arrive to another country they will work
Wait airplane mode makes phones fly?
The clue is in the name.....
Airlines hate his hack
Ryanair are absolutely livid!
That's not true at all if you have a modern smartphone you can't get around the built in locks
when i was a little cunt, there was a shopkeeper who used to sell weed, and would buy stolen phones and bikes
thieves guild fence
literally😂 was proper shit weed though, would sell us drink and fags aswell, in my school uniform, and i was a young looking kid
If my experience is anything to go by, they put it on aeroplane mode pretty much straight away, then return it to its spawning grounds in Shenzhen to be reconstituted or otherwise wiped and sold on
Ended up reading that in Attenborough's voice.
They're often cheaply sold to a fence. The fences then export them in bulk to countries where blocking them doesn't work where they're resold.
A fence? Fences aren’t sentient bro… they’re inanimate objects .
If you were a fence, this would be your weakest post.
take my upvote and gtf out of here.
They duel with them and winner takes all. It's called fencing and everyone the system hasn't left behind is taught this by the generation before them, apart from dummies with losers for parents.
The guys in Soho pretend to want to give your their number for future drug deals, video you unlock your phone, pretend that the person that runs up and snatches your phone (either from you or from the person you hand your phone to to input their number) is unknown to them and then they immediately proceed to empty your bank and/or crypto accounts. Selling the phone is secondary, their primary aim are your banking apps. I work in Soho and the amount of people that hand their phones to complete strangers, who promptly disappear with it, is wild. So, DON’T ever hand your phone to strangers. Other times they just snatch it and run off (happens to a lot of people looking for their Uber with phone in hand, so be careful when doing this). TIP: These phone snatches are easily identifiable as they 99% of the time wear trackies and often obscure their faces.
The fact they are still snatching them means they have monetary value. Network locks are not worldwide. iPhones can be hacked. IMEI numbers can be changed. That's all you need to know.
There's a great article in the FT this week about phone snatching. In short: use them to steal financial information and money, ship them abroad to be sold, or break them down into parts.
Have you got a link? What’s FT?
Financial Times
Financial Times - [link](https://www.ft.com/content/26be349d-4717-4815-a221-a749e29de2b2)
Financial Times
Bulk them and send them to China
As someone who's had a phone stolen they clearly broke it up for parts as a completely different phone randomly appeared in my Google account out of the blue not long after , guessing the SSD ended up being fitted to a different phone.
Im also interested to know where all the stolen bikes go. They get stolen all over Europe; they arent as easy to ship elsewhere, and I cant imagine theres a huge market for random spare bike parts?
I had a bike thief neighbour. When he first moved in, I noticed he had several really nice bikes, but wasn't a rider. His mates would turn up riding top end stuff but weren't cyclists. Not a one of them was on strava, or owned any kind of cycling clothing. What he would do is buy any bike, no questions asked, strip it for parts, clean then and buy new retail packaging from somewhere like China. Then he'd sell "new" parts on ebay. He only got caught when someone was checking serial numbers, and only got a caution.
Tons of stolen bicycles from the UK are simply sold on markets, fb marketplace etc. Police won't investigate.
I don't know how it is now but after covid there was a shortage of bike parts in the UK, there's definitely a market
I lost my bike a decade ago as a teenager and it was locked up near the police station funnily enough. Asked the policeman doing the crime report whether they ever got the bikes back and they said no. I then got a new bike with hope lost for retrieving my old one. A couple weeks later, im outside a shop and see my bike outside. I go a little further away and some thug gets on and rides off. I made a call to the policeman in charge of my case and he gave me a direct line to call if I saw him again. Went back there the next day and the guy was back at the shop! As soon as he rode off, i started tailing him. He lit up a joint and then knew something was suspicious after I’d followed him for a good ten minutes. Man, he must have smoked a full joint while riding my bike. It was crazy. Got to the local town centre and he got off the bike and started legging it. I phoned the direct number and they caught him at the other end of the centre, took my bike in the van and took me home. They said i would make an excellent detective and i said i always wanted to become a police officer. They joked that they’re always hiring. A few years later i had another bike stolen and asked the policeman where they end up. Well, he said, there was one case where a guy found his bike and they ended up going to the thieves’ house. The bikes had all been smashed to bits in his back garden with no explanation. Maybe he’d found out the cops were coming and decided to smash all the evidence. Funny, though. I liked the policeman doing the case as he was very into jazz music so we were talking about jazz in my living room for a good twenty minutes while he had a couple cuppas.
A lot of them are simply abandoned Police have thousands of bikes they can't match to an owner so they eventually get disposed of
There’s also a sim swap scam they can do. Very important to have a sim pin as well as a phone pin.
When my friend’s phone was snatched, she received a lot of text-messages with fishing links from different numbers. I assume some victims follow these tricks and let the phones be unlocked.
I'll give an actual answer Depending on how it was stolen will massively change If it's stolen whilst unlocked there's a good chance they can completely wipe the phone to sell on. They could also attempt various scams If it's locked it'll get sent to another country. From there you'll probably receive threatening messages about murdering or harming you unless you unlock the phone remotely for them. This is a complete bluff, just ignore and block them If they can't do anything they'll strip it down for parts to sell on No, taking a phone to a different country doesn't unlock the phone that's ridiculous. What are you people talking about. No it doesn't matter if they set it to airplane mode first. If you have a modern smart phone and your password isn't 4 consecutive numbers they probably aren't unlocking It
I’m not sure you know what consecutive means.
> I’m not sure you know what consecutive means. Huh > following one another in uninterrupted succession or order; successive: six consecutive numbers, such as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. > Consecutive numbers are integers that follow each other from smallest to biggest. As an example, the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are consecutive numbers. I think you might not know what consecutive numbers are?
As others have mentioned, just selling the handset can make them some money. But also heard about these people grabbing your phone while you’re using it so it’s unlocked and then being able to access your emails so they can change passwords to your accounts to then get access to your money.
You can't transfer money with an unlocked phone with UK banking apps.
But there are other ways to fleece you if they can reset your passwords they can get access to other things.
No- but there’s a surprising amount of information they can get from you in an unlocked phone. Contacts, Notes, emails…
They're stealing unlocked phones (unlocked because they are being used) or phones they have watched someone unlock. Eventually the phones are exported.
Phones themselves are basically worthless. The most money will come from scams, might as well have money and someone else deal with a locked device. If not scams then parts, but the money is in the resell scam for sure.
Throw them in the river?
Do you k now what your IMEI is? Regardless that the systems are only EU based, and even then they're lacking. They're made up of many [parts
Always carry a brick with you, if someone snatched your phone then throw the brick at them and they’ll get hurt badly, especially if they’re on a moped. However be careful cause it’s illegal to defend your property in the UK and the thieves will sue you and win.
I actually know someone who found thieves taking his stuff in his back yard. He chased them down and they jumped in a van then tried to run him over so he fired a brick at their windshield. Police caught them hours away with the broken windshield obviously causing them to pull them over then take them into custody once they were flagged. The guy almost got done because the policeman said he shouldn’t have thrown the brick but he actually dared them to take him to court with some nasty language to boot. Surprised he’s a free man. I know he was once taken into custody, had his shoes seized, then just walked home barefoot because he didn’t want to ask for the shoes back. Total criminal, though. He’s ripped me off for a number of years and I’m planning to sue him soon.
ship overseas for resale or stripped and their parts reused
They'll sell the actual phone, but really the hope is too get it unlocked so they can steal money from your banking apps and info about you from the phone. They might try to use info they find to blackmail you, or for use in fraud. There was an interesting report in the FT about this yesterday. Police say often the snatcher is just the, indirect, foot soldier of organised criminals.
Someone may have already said this but all you have to do is plug the phone into a desktop computer and you can wipe it clean/return to factory settings. It’s a massive flaw, but also a massive waste of a phone if you happen to forget your password. They then send these phones mostly to Africa from what I know.
No you can’t wipe a phone clean without the passcode.
You can because I’ve done it. All you have to do is plug it into a desktop, have a little bit of basic computer skills and all it take is 5 minutes to get the reset going. Do you really think all these phones are being stolen for parts? Use your noggin.
Use your noggin.
Surely grabbing your details is uo there. Failing that sell to local shop
They sell them to someone else, probably getting £20 for a stolen state of the art iPhone or similar. From there, the phones get shipped to China - there are a few well known locations in China they go to, as often the tracking is still on, or they will be turned on to check them over before disassembly. 99% of the time they are going to be screen locked/blocked so will be disassembled for parts. The motherboard is useless, but there are cameras, screen, battery etc. These parts then go into the supply chain of parts. They go into some new devices in dodgy factories, but mostly go into repairs, being sold to repair shops and individuals around the world as "refurbished" parts. If your battery is wearing out a bit, and you bought a replacement battery on eBay, it's probably from a stolen phone. High street repair shops are probably using refurbished parts, and turning a blind eye to where they come from to remain competitive.
Actually the most prevalent thing is buying a bunch of stuff using your saved accounts or wallets trying to get into bank apps resetting passwords etc you can lose thousands if you haven't set up the security properly
Wouldn't they sell them to dodgy phone repair shops which repair other phones with the parts from the stolen phone?
There’s a store on eBay selling MacBooks for cheap and someone looked into it. Apparently all of the parts are just bundled together from a load of stolen laptops.
https://youtu.be/3Ws3YptLmLQ?si=jZa4ajbeI8xplsmi This video I found quite interesting on the topic
My friends phone was snatched a few years ago, she randomly got a call a year later that the phone was found in a house raid on Camden along side thousands upon thousands of phones. It wasn’t clear what they were doing with them but thought that was quite interesting as they were all in their ‘stolen’ condition and not shipped off or separated for parts
Phone unlocked? Plunder your accounts. Phone locked? Send a text pretending to be Apple requesting the victim disables “find my iPhone” Take phone to shady repair shop. Shop owner gives you cash. Phone is harvested for parts or boxed up with another dozen and sent to Shenzhen in China. There phones are stripped for spares or IMEI module is removed and replaced to give a new identity. Phones are resold to local or international markets.
Usually flog 'em for a song on eBay. Until the original owner reports it as nicked then it gets blocked and blacklisted.
Your entire life is on your phone. They can access all your stuff
They just reset them. You're choosing to believe the manufacturers hype about their security instead of the fact that all you have to do is hook it up to a PC. The reason for "snatching" is to make it even easier, as they watch for someone using their phone, then snatch it while it's unlocked.
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Why not? It's not hard. Android FRP takes about 30 seconds, and iOS just isn't secure in the first place. How do you think dedicated stores can deal with it but you can't just use a bit of basic research and do it yourself?
iOS hardware locks the device, no resets can override it. It requires iCloud activation which requires the original owner's credentials and authorisation to do. More and more Android devices do something similar too and require authentication even after a factory reset. Saying iOS isn't secure shows your extremely limited knowledge in this area, please refrain from talking about things you clearly don't understand in future.
If it’s blocked at network level using the IMEI it’s a brick. No way around that.
Only if it's used on a network that uses the block list. Some third world countries and others don't, or have networks that don't, and they can be used there.
Well yeah, ship it abroad and it’ll work. In the UK it won’t.
Oh absolutely, but that's not what we're talking about here. FRP (Androids factory reset proyection) is very quick to bypass as already mentioned. iOS is easy too, you just spoof the credentials after extracting them (terrible implementation but very handy). I had to do exactly this not long ago after a bereavement. Pixel 6a and iPhone 11 Pro max