APPLE
PICKING
asked her to stop. “It will only
cause you heartbreak,” he told her.
Hyun Sup Yang attributed her
son’s death to the insatiable demand for the world’s most popular phone. “If my son never had an
iPhone,” she said in an interview,
“he would be alive now.”
Yang’s murder stands as a chilling example of a modern-day
crime wave sweeping the country,
sometimes with deadly consequences. From New York to San
Francisco to Washington, D.C.,
police have reported a surge in
thefts of smartphones and tablet
computers — iPhones and iPads
in particular. The spike in robberies has grown so pronounced that
police have coined a term for such
crimes: Apple picking.
Every day, criminals snatch
phones on crowded streets, inside restaurants, and on subways, reselling their stolen
wares on the internet, on street
corners and inside local convenience stores. Phone thefts tend
to rise right after the release of
new Apple products, according
to police in New York City.
Apple declined to comment for
this story.
The growing street crime is the
most visible example of what law
HUFFINGTON
03.24.13
enforcement authorities describe
as a well-orchestrated underground global industry: Many stolen phones are shipped to distant
points on the globe, sold to consumers in Asia, Eastern Europe and
Latin America. It is a market now
worth some $30 billion a year, according to Lookout, a San Francisco-based mobile security firm.
The global nature of this illicit
trade stems in part from measures
American wireless carriers have
“I T’S EASY TO BLAME STREET
CRIMINALS. BUT SOMEBODY IS
CREATING A MARKET FOR THESE
PHONES IN THE NAME OF PROFIT.”
imposed to make it harder to resell
stolen phones in the United States,
prompting criminals to seek new
markets overseas. But it also results from the unique business
model used to sell smartphones
to American consumers. In the
United States, cell phone carriers
subsidize the costs of the phones,
while in most other countries customers pay full retail price.
The same iPhone that Americans can obtain for $250 can fetch
as much as $800 on the streets of