Apple Backs Met Police Push to Make Stolen iPhones Unusable

Apple and the Metropolitan Police have started sharing data on stolen iPhones, the latest move in Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s two-and-a-half-year campaign to make stolen handsets “unusable bricks.” Phone theft has fallen 18 per cent across London over the past 12 months and dropped 45.8 per cent in Westminster so far this year, the Met disclosed alongside the deal on Thursday. The agreement gives the force a way to track whether a reported stolen handset reappears anywhere in circulation after the theft.

The same data documents the scale of the underlying problem. In the year to the end of December 2025, 6.9 per cent of personal robbery cases in London ended with a suspect identified; for theft from the person, the rate was 0.9 per cent. The international trade in stolen phones remains a multimillion-pound business. The Met is now asking the Home Secretary to turn the Apple deal into a sector-wide legal requirement.

Apple joins the Met’s data-sharing plan

The Met’s new arrangement stolen-device identifier sharing with Apple will feed stolen-phone reports into a single intelligence picture that officers and Apple’s security team can both query. The agreement was disclosed by Rowley on Thursday, three months after he gave the industry a 1 June deadline to deliver “concrete commitments” on rendering stolen handsets unusable bricks or face a formal call for legislation. Kate Adams, Apple’s senior vice president of government affairs, called the partnership an extension of work Apple was already doing to “disrupt the market for stolen phones.” The Met says early data from the collaboration shows that “a significant number” of stolen phones in a recent sample have not been successfully reactivated. Rowley framed the next move as a test of whether Apple’s concession forces the rest of the industry to match it.

The Met says the early data shows the partnership is “already making a difference,” though neither the force nor Apple has published the share of stolen phones that have failed to reactivate since the agreement was reached. The deal is not a hard real-time block; it gives officers a way to flag a reported device and to track whether it resurfaces. The mechanism is to take the international resale value away and the street-level incentive goes with it. A stolen phone which cannot be reactivated on any network, the Met says, has no market.

• 14,000 fewer phone thefts in London, June 2025 to May 2026
• 18 per cent drop in mobile phone theft across London, year on year
• 45.8 per cent drop in Westminster, January to May 2026
• 6.9 per cent of personal robberies ended with a suspect identified, 2025
• 0.9 per cent of thefts from the person ended with a suspect identified, 2025

The numbers behind the drop

Across London, the Met has cut theft-from-the-person and robbery offences where a phone was taken by 14,000 over the year to May 2026, an 18 per cent reduction on the prior 12 months. For the first five months of 2026, the figure is 6,700 fewer such offences, a 20.6 per cent drop. Westminster accounts for 4,500 of those missing phones in the same period, a 45.8 per cent reduction on the same five months of 2025. The Met describes London as a national outlier for personal robbery and theft-from-the-person per 1,000 people, and the force solves one of the smallest proportions of these offences in England and Wales. All three figures are theft-from-the-person and robbery offences where a phone was stolen, not the wider category of phone-related crime.

Between 2017 and February 27 2024, Freedom of Information data shows 587,498 phones were stolen in London excluding the City; 13,998 were recovered, and 573,500 were not. In the year to the end of December 2025, the Met identified a suspect in 6.9 per cent of personal robbery cases and in 0.9 per cent of thefts-from-the-person. Those percentages are the reason the campaign is now focused on Apple. Rowley put it bluntly in the release: if stolen phones cannot be reactivated, the value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them.

Offences across London were down 15.6 per cent in the financial year 2025/26, the equivalent of more than 40,000 fewer victims of crime. Theft-from-the-person across all categories fell 21.4 per cent, vehicle crime fell 13.9 per cent, and personal robbery fell 13 per cent. A Yonder poll of 1,109 adults, conducted for the Met between 20 and 21 May, found 83 per cent support for the permanent blocking of stolen smartphones. Khan has put the total of seized and recovered devices at 13,000 over the last year, and described the funding behind the West End operation as “record.” The Met is now under pressure to show that the trend holds after the headline operations wind down. The October-to-March arrest figures are not yet broken out.

The force has framed the next stage of the campaign in export-market language. “What looks like a street-level snatch is in fact the entry point to a transnational criminal business worth hundreds of millions of pounds,” the Met said at its March conference. That language has framed the Apple deal as much as the Westminster figures. Adams said Apple welcomed the impact of Operation Reckoning in helping drive down phone theft across London.

Westminster as the test case

Westminster is where the data is most striking. The borough accounts for between 69 and 72 per cent of the city’s weekly thefts-from-the-person and personal robberies, a concentration the Met has used to argue that targeted policing in a small area can move the whole London number. Phone theft in the West End has fallen by 50 per cent over the past year, a figure the Met ties to “relentless, targeted policing.” Westminster’s 45.8 per cent reduction in the first five months of 2026 accounts for 4,500 fewer phones stolen. Khan says City Hall funding has doubled the number of police officers in the West End.

New tools are visible on the streets. Officers use high-powered Sur-Ron electric bikes to chase the e-bike-borne snatchers that the Met says now dominate the trade. Drones support evidence gathering in hotspot areas, and a central London Command Cell was set up in the last twelve months. The Met has seized more than 3,500 illegally modified e-bikes and e-scooters since January 2025.

Operation Reckoning, a series of crackdowns launched in early 2025, has become the test bed. The latest, Operation Reckoning 5, ran from 1 June and produced arrests in west London, East Ham, and Hackney, including the pursuit and arrest of a prolific phone thief after a high-speed chase on 5 June. A four-week crackdown earlier in the year netted 248 arrests and 770 recovered devices. A single raid on a phone shop in north-west London in April pulled in more than 1,000 suspected stolen handsets and led to four arrests. A separate 32-strong gang investigation recovered 1,000 phones and 200 laptops bound for export, with 20 of those arrested so far charged.

Children paid £380 a phone

The Met has seen adverts on Snapchat offering children as much as £380 to steal a single iPhone, with a £100 bonus for stealing 10. Children as young as 14 have been identified among those paid to snatch devices for criminal networks. The Met calls the practice an “entry point into organised crime.” The recruitment has become a political pressure point of its own.

Rowley said the Snapchat recruitment was grooming teenagers into longer criminal careers. “Children recruited to snatch phones for quick cash are being groomed into criminal networks, normalised into offending behaviour and pushed further into exploitation,” he said at the March conference. “What begins as one device on a street corner becomes a pathway into debt, coercion, violence and deeper criminality.”

The 32-strong gang investigation described children being paid hundreds of pounds per handset, with incentives “promoted on social media.” A second investigation found three mobile phone handlers had trafficked up to 40,000 devices from the UK to China between 2024 and 2025, around 40 per cent of all phones stolen in London over that period. The Snapchat-led recruitment is the on-ramp into that supply chain. Of the 32 arrested, 20 have been charged so far, with more expected. The Met has not yet said how many of the 20 charged are children.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has framed the broader pattern as a national emergency that policing alone cannot address. At a summit earlier this year, she brought together Apple, Google, Samsung, the National Crime Agency, and the Mayor of London to push for joint action. “Over the last few years, mobile phone thefts have shot up, often driven by organised crime, leaving our streets feeling less safe,” Mahmood said at the meeting. The government has kickstarted the recruitment of 13,000 neighbourhood police officers, police community support officers, and specials with £200 million in investment, with a named officer for every community.

Following the phones out of the country

The criminal market is structured around export. According to police data, 75 per cent of phones stolen in London are smuggled abroad, and about a quarter of those end up in Algeria. Last year, police confiscated 1,000 stolen mobile phones at Heathrow Airport that were destined for North Africa. One April case, the prosecution of three handlers who pleaded guilty, concerned a network that trafficked up to 40,000 devices from the UK to China between 2024 and 2025, about 40 per cent of all phones stolen in London over that period. Khan has put the value of the trade at £50 million a year, a figure that recurs across Met and City Hall statements.

The Apple deal targets the export pipeline at the activation stage. If a stolen iPhone cannot be reactivated on a network, its resale value abroad collapses. The Met says early data from the Apple agreement shows that “a significant number” of stolen phones in a recent sample have not been successfully reactivated, reducing their value to criminals.

The Met’s ultimate ask is the ability to block devices globally in real time. “If a stolen phone were to become an unusable brick and the parts were not recyclable, there would be no criminal market,” Rowley said in March. The March conference drew delegates from Japan, Brazil, Spain, and the United States, and Rowley used the stage to call for similar action internationally. The Apple deal is the Met’s most concrete arrangement with a single major manufacturer to date.

If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them. We are driving up the risk for offenders while cutting off the reward.

Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, in a statement on Thursday.

What the Met wants the Home Secretary to mandate

The Apple deal does not satisfy the Met’s full agenda. The force has the Commissioner’s ultimatum to phone manufacturers still on the table, and the campaign’s most concrete legislative asks are now in front of ministers. Mahmood has said the government will legislate “where necessary” to give police the powers they need to treat phone theft “with the seriousness it warrants.” The Met says its next step is to “consider our next steps” and that “calling for legislation remains a live option.” Khan has backed the legislative route, saying “decisive and coordinated action from the mobile phone industry is long overdue.”

The Home Secretary has hosted a mobile phone theft summit with Apple, Google, Samsung, the National Crime Agency, and the Mayor of London. The summit agreed to a “much deeper dive” on available data and intelligence and to reconvene in three months. The next meeting will be the test of whether the Apple deal forces a sector-wide move or remains a one-off.

The Met’s specific asks, as laid out at the March conference and re-stated in its most recent communications, run to four items. The force wants legislation that would set a minimum standard the industry cannot fall below. The March press release is the source for all four. Each ask corresponds to a specific gap Rowley named at the March conference.

• Multi-factor authentication and time delays when a phone is reset, to make the post-theft handover harder to complete
• A block on parts being sold without device-matching serial numbers
• A real-time block that can render a stolen phone unusable anywhere in the world
• Mandatory publication by every phone company of data on stolen devices and on how many get reconnected to a network

Samsung says it has already implemented features requested by the force, including making IMEI numbers visible on locked screens, and contacted 40 million UK customers with security guidance. Google highlighted Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock, and Remote Lock as default-on protections, plus new controls to prevent thieves from unlocking devices. Apple has pointed to Stolen Device Protection in its iOS 26.4 software beta, which is enabled by default, and to Activation Lock as the background mechanism that already makes a lost or stolen iPhone harder to use or sell. The companies say they have already moved on individual features. The Met says the moves do not yet match the scale of the problem.

The Met’s framing of the next steps as a “live option” means a formal request for legislation is still possible if industry compliance falls short. Khan said on Thursday that the Apple agreement shows the industry can move when pushed. The next checkpoint is the Home Office’s response to the Met’s request to begin preparing legislation.

Where the strategy still leaves a hole

The Apple deal does not extend to every manufacturer, and the solve rate remains the most stubborn gap. Even with phone theft down 18 per cent across London and almost halved in Westminster, the Met still identifies a suspect in only 0.9 per cent of thefts-from-the-person and 6.9 per cent of personal robberies. Most stolen phones, on the historical data, are never recovered at all. Khan’s £50 million-a-year trade figure, the 14,000 fewer victims over the past 12 months, and the 587,498 devices stolen between 2017 and February 2024 are the three numbers the Met will carry into any future legislative fight.

The Met’s own conference in March laid out the limits of self-regulation. “For nearly three years we have sought meaningful engagement with phone manufacturers and their response to date does not match the scale of harm and risk to their customers,” Rowley said. Apple, Samsung, and Google have all moved on individual features, but none has yet committed to the ability to block devices globally in real time that the Met has called for. The 1 June deadline has passed, and the next test for the Met’s strategy is whether Apple’s concession is followed by a sector-wide move before the Met escalates to a formal legislative request. Khan said on Thursday that the Apple agreement shows the industry can move when pushed.

Keeping our users, their devices, and their data safe is at the heart of what we do. That includes building industry-leading security features that significantly reduce the motivation for criminals to target people in the first place.

Kate Adams, Apple’s senior vice president of government affairs, in a statement released alongside the Metropolitan Police’s announcement.