
The Met’s Cdr 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.”
He added that there were calls for other agencies and the government to do more, and for tech companies to make stolen phones unusable.
The force wants the phone industry to prevent stolen handsets from being reconnected to cloud services.
The Met said it had used tracking technology, and victims reporting phone-thefts, to recently prosecute four members of a gang who were later sentenced to a combined 18 years in prison.
The gang had been caught handling more than 5,000 stolen phones.
BBC News