Police Arrest 141 New York City Merchants in Stolen iPhone Sting
The New York Post reports that a sting conducted by the New York Police Department last week targeting vendors suspected of selling stolen iPhones resulted in 141 arrests as the city works to cut down the market feeding on such thefts. According to the report, undercover officers approached workers at over 600 locations suspected of participating in sales of stolen iPhones and offered the devices to workers at low prices while stating that they had been stolen from their owners.
Undercover NYPD officers sold the electronics to merchants at more than 600 stores around the five boroughs this week — asking from $50 to $200 for iPhone 4s and iPad 2s — after clearly stating the popular gadgets were stolen, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
The sting — which nabbed clerks and workers at businesses such as supermarkets, barbershops, pawnshops and bodegas — began Tuesday and continued through yesterday.
“That’s our intention, to reduce the places where people who steal these things can go and sell them,” said NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. “If someone is offering you an iPad for way below market value, you have to realize that it’s most likely stolen.”
iPhones are popular targets for thieves in New York and elsewhere, with an officer in one New York precinct reporting that in some months more than half of the reported robberies involve an iPhone.
The popularity of Apple's devices has not only driven an active market in thefts and resales of the stolen property, but also in counterfeiting. Apple has been targeting vendors selling counterfeit Apple products in New York City and elsewhere, seeking to shut down those companies making unauthorized profits on Apple's name with knockoff products.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
Criminal: That's fine, I'll take it to make money.
It is time to create a law in the U.S. that is common in some (not sure how many) develop countries to eliminate the market for stolen phones. Currently in the US, when a phone is stolen, it is only deactivated and blocked by your carrier. If it were deactivated and blocked by all US carriers, then it would immediately collapse the market for stolen phones as the thief just wouldn't be able to sell for as rich a price. Eliminate the price premium and the thieves will not have as much an incentive to steal phones.
Just think how much money is invested into the law enforcement, reporting, and investigating into stolen phones. If the market for stolen phones can effectively be made unattractive, then all that law enforcement costs drop or can be applied to more important matters for society.
Australia does it pretty effectively and this is save consumers a tremendous amount of money because the number of phones stolen is dropping a staggering rates.
http://www.amta.org.au/pages/amta/The.Mobile.Phone.Industry.Statement
dt
I hope this will prevent someone from stealing my iPhone. I grew up with the notion that if you buy a known stolen item it is the same as if you stole it. :cool: