Phone firms ‘must bring in a kill switch’ after making it too easy for snatchers

Smartphone companies have been to stop making it easy for thieves to snatch devices and to install ‘kill switches’.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the safety features of phone companies are to easy to be disabled as soon as they are stolen.

She said a lot of people ‘don’t know’ how to make the most of the features already available to them.

‘That’s why we need the tech companies to keep making progress and to do much more to make sure that there’s not an incentive to steal phones and they can be switched off straight away,’ Ms Cooper added.

Police may also be given extra powers to track down stolen mobiles, as they currently are unable to enter and search a building with multiple dwellings – despite my Find My iPhone showing them to be there.

PS Simon Gratton told Metro: ‘A Find My iPhone location is not deemed to be enough evidence for a court to give us a warrant to search a property.

‘They are only accurate to 3 metres, and these snatchers aren’t stupid, they know to put phones on airplane mode so it only shows the last known location, not the current one.

‘Also if the location shows up in a block of flats, you can’t search every single property in the building just to find one phone.’

Ms Cooper chaired a summit of police and tech companies yesterday to tackle the surge.

More than 52,000 phones were stolen in London last year, with the worst-hit borough was the City of Westminster, with 18,863 incidents reported.

Camden was the second worst affected, with 4,806 incidents, followed by Southwark (4,376), Hackney (2,761), Newham (2,585), Lambeth (2,394) and Islington (2,117).

This number made up more than half of reported phone thefts in all of England and Wales.

Police managed to recover 1,000 stolen devices in the space of a week.

Commander Owain Richards said: ‘We are seeing phone thefts on an industrial scale, fuelled by criminals making millions by being able to easily sell on stolen devices either here or abroad.

‘By intensifying our efforts we’re catching more perpetrators and protecting people from having their phone stolen in the capital. But we need help from partners and industry to do more.

‘That is why we’re working with other agencies and Government to tackle the organised criminality driving this trade and calling on tech companies to make stolen phones unusable.’

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