HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
THE BIG STEAL
theft last year and why thefts of
mobile devices now make up 40
percent of all robberies in major
American cities. The rising street
crime is exacting a heavy toll on
consumers who spend an estimated $30 billion each year replacing
lost and stolen devices, according
to Lookout, a San Francisco-based
mobile security firm.
Smartphone-related crime has
also turned increasingly violent.
Last month, a 24-year-old man
was shot in Philadelphia after police say he would not give up his
cell phone to a thief. Last year,
26-year-old Hwangbum Yang of
New York City and 23-year-old
Megan Boken of suburban Chicago
were shot and killed during separate iPhone robberies, police say.
In response to the crime wave,
state and city law enforcement
officials are investigating smartphone makers for their failure to
adopt measures that would render
their devices inoperable when stolen. New York Attorney General
Eric Schneiderman pressed smartphone manufacturers in May to
create “kill switch” technology to
undercut the black market, noting
that “foreign trafficking of stolen
devices has proliferated.”
Phone trafficking also costs the
I make more money than the dope
man, but have none of the risk.
wireless industry “hundreds of
millions of dollars a year,” said
James Baldinger, an attorney for
Sprint. One alleged phone trafficker, Hassan Essayli, admitted
in 2008 that his company, Platform Enterprises, shipped 30,000
phones from California to other
countries in just two months, according to his testimony in a lawsuit filed by TracFone Wireless.
“I’m seeing thousands and
thousands of phones being resold
overseas,” Baldinger said. “The
numbers are so big, but a lot of
time it flies under the radar.”
Over the last eight years, wireless companies have filed more
than 200 lawsuits against alleged phone traffickers, but no
case has bigger stakes than the
federal lawsuit Sprint filed last
summer against Ace Wholesale,
Baldinger said. Sprint has accused Ace of buying thousands of
Sprint phones and reselling them
overseas, thereby depriving the
wireless company of revenue from
monthly phone bills.
“As far as we know,” Baldinger