Thomas Baker, a 24-year-old from North Carolina, lost his iPhone. He tracked the location of his phone through the “Find My” app and found that his iPhone had traveled across the ocean to China. This inadvertently revealed the serious problem of rampant phone theft in the United States due to the increase in demand for second-hand phones in China, which involved black market transactions.
NBC News reported that the FBI said that iPhones have become the “new cash” for criminal groups because they can be quickly sold on the black market, especially in the international market where it is difficult to track.
Andrew Huang, a Singaporean hardware engineer familiar with the electronics industry in Shenzhen, China, said that although Apple launched the “Lost Mode” to prevent iPhones from being cracked, disassembling parts is still profitable, and Shenzhen’s “Huaqiang North Electronics City” is one of the notorious iPhone black markets.
Earlier this year, Baker was watching an NFL game at a bar in Charlotte, North Carolina, when he was shocked to find that his iPhone had been stolen from his back pocket. He immediately marked his phone as lost that night through Apple’s cloud storage and computing service iCloud, and tracked its location using the “Find” app.
Unexpectedly, after Baker’s phone was stolen in North Carolina, the signal showed that it had traveled all the way south from South Carolina to Florida, then to Tennessee, and finally crossed the ocean to China, 8,000 miles away.
Baker believes that the most incredible part of the stolen iPhone’s “global journey” was that the phone once stayed in a Christian church in downtown Miami, Florida for several days. Baker found that since August last year, dozens of victims of iPhone thefts have contacted the church, saying that the location of the stolen iPhone had appeared there.
The church’s pastor, Gideon Apé, confirmed that he had received calls, emails and social media messages from people whose phones had been stolen from all over the world, and some even brought the police to inquire. Miami police searched the church but found nothing. However, the signal showed that the stolen phones all came to the church, which was obviously not accidental, but a systematic crime.
Ape stressed that the church was not involved in the case, and the church was closed after renovation in 2018 and was not reopened until December last year. As for why the location of the mobile phone was repeatedly shown in the church, experts believe that it may be due to the difference in the global positioning system (GPS) or wireless network (WiFi) signal.
After Baker’s iPhone was stolen, he was also defrauded; he received a phishing message from a fake Apple, asking him to click on a URL to unlock the phone, and even received a threatening text message from the Philippines, saying that the phone and personal information would be auctioned on the black market, but Baker ignored it.
Andrew Huang said that if the stolen phone can clear the internal information and sell it as a new phone, the price can be as high as 800 yuan, so the criminal group will find ways to unlock the phone. However, if the phone is locked, it can still be disassembled and its parts can be sold, although the money earned is much less, and the world’s largest mobile phone parts market is Huaqiangbei Electronics City.
