Smartphones Hot On Stolen List
December 21st, 2010 | by Mobile Data Group |The fashionable folk tapping on Blackberrys or using apps on iPhones in New York, Paris or Barcelona have more in common than a taste for expensive hand-held devices.
They are also likely to be targeted by thieves in a smartphone crime wave fuelled by the enormous appetite for the machines that serve as status symbols, essential worktools and mobile entertainment centres.
The Paris police chief sounded the alarm last week when he said smartphones were the hottest item for thieves on the city’s metro and that robbers were increasingly turning to violence to get their hands on them.
Seventy percent of all phones stolen on the transport system are now iPhones or Blackberrys or the other smartphones that can cost hundreds of dollars, according to police figures.
Three men were beaten up in Paris, and one was stabbed, when they were set upon a week ago by a gang who wanted their iPhones. That was just one of the hundreds of violent incidents that police say happen in the French capital every month, three quarters of them involving telephone thefts.
In Britain, a 30-strong National Mobile Phone Crime Unit is battling what a police spokesman said is “a general increase in the proportion of thefts which involve smartphones.”