On a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh told BBC that as he walked out of the Holborn subway station in central London, he checked his iPhone. To his surprise, a thief riding an electric bike snatched his phone from him.
Etteh quickly tried to catch up, but the thief managed to get away. However, for Etteh, there was another layer of frustration: he was able to track where his device went but couldn’t retrieve it.
About an hour later, Etteh returned home and activated the “Find My iPhone” feature on his laptop, setting his iPhone 13 to lost mode, preventing the thief from accessing its content. Moreover, he was able to pinpoint the approximate location of the phone.
Almost immediately, Etteh received a notification showing that the phone was in Islington. Eight days later, the phone emitted signals from different locations in the northern part of London.
During this time, he also rushed to the two locations where the phone appeared to “have a look around.” He said, “It was quite dangerous.” Fuming with anger, he didn’t speak to anyone and felt like he was being watched, so he returned home.
“I was really angry,” he said. “The phone is expensive. We work hard to earn money to afford these phones, while others just say ‘forget about it’.”
Then, in May, over a month after the theft, Etteh checked “Find My iPhone” again and discovered that his beloved phone had ended up on the other side of the world—Shenzhen, China.
Etteh gave up hope of recovering the phone.
It’s not uncommon for stolen phones to surface in Shenzhen. With a population of 17.6 million, Shenzhen is a major tech hub in China where if devices cannot be unlocked and reused, they are dismantled for parts.
As of March in the past year, it’s estimated that England and Wales experienced 78,000 cases of “snatch theft,” a significant increase from the previous year, with Etteh being just one of the victims.
Victims have shared with the BBC the impact of such incidents on them, some losing precious photos while others losing tens of thousands of pounds in wealth.