UK Gov tackle mobile theft with txt spk
Link: ‘Txt Spk’ Campaign To Tackle Mobile Theft |Sky News|UK News
With rather ironic timing after Ewan’s recent mobile phone theft, the UK Government have announced a £500k advertising campaign aimed at reducing mobile phone theft.
The Home Office advertisments, targeting 16-25 year olds, are asking ’r u getting the msg?’, and stressing that stolen mobile phones will be turned into a brick within 48 hours as they’ll be blocked from all networks.
Baroness Scotland, the Minister responsible for the campaign, said: “Home Office minister Baroness Scotland said: “I want this campaign to take the bottom out of the illicit phone market entirely. Young people should be left in no doubt that stolen phones won’t work anymore. The prize will be a dramatic reduction in mobile phone crime overall making young people safer.”
According to statistics obtained by Sky News, seven out of 10 mobile phone thefts occur when a handset is left unattended, and phones are amongst the stolen items in 52% of robberies - and the only item stolen in around 28%.
Since April 2007 it’s been an offence under the Violent Crime Reduction Act to offer to or agree to re-program a mobile phone - whereas before police officers had to actually catch someone in the act of re-programming a mobile before being able to arrest them.
This is all well & good, assuming the handsets are being stolen to resell in the UK.
Fact is, most stolen handsets end up in the developing world, where less-than-scrupulous MNO’s don’t impliment blacklists of stolen handset IMEI’s. Some networks in places like Pakistan have a massive proportion of their handsets sourced from Europe, so there’s a real incentive not to block obviously foreign handsets from thier networks.
This move will simply put off the small minority of kids who aren’t stealing to order for international cartels.
Put it this way: It’s profitable for a UK person to legally buy a prepay handset at £100 and post it to Pakistan, where it sells for twice that. The industry calls this ‘box breaking’, and it’s a massive problem. It’s not actually illegal in the UK. Some estimates put 25% of prepay handset sales down to box breakers. That’s handset subsidy the MNO’s will never see back in the form of call revenue.
So long as handsets are subsidised by UK operators, but end up used overseas with foreign MNO sim’s, there will be a financial imperitive to nick them.
Posted by Mike on June 22nd, 2007 at 7:34 pm.Mike is right, if the government really want to tackle the problem of phone crime they should strenghten the current legislation and make the export of blocked handsets illegal.
Posted by John on June 23rd, 2007 at 10:04 am.They should also stop retailers from laundering stolen handsets, by this I mean its possible to take a stolen phone into a retail store and use it as part exchange for a new handset or some will even give you cash back, they never bother to check the Police database of stolen handsets or the blacklist!