HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
THE BIG STEAL
million in less than a year.
But recently, thefts have become bolder and more violent:
Traffickers have been acquiring
phones through a growing number
of cell phone store robberies, according to local and federal law
enforcement officials.
“A guy can go into a cell phone
store and steal 30 or 40 phones
and get a lot more than if he hit a
bank,” said Deaven, the Homeland
Security agent. “It’s just a very
lucrative crime.”
In Houston’s Harris County last
year, thieves robbed at least a dozen
cell phone stores — sometimes at
gunpoint — during a two-month
period, prompting the police department to establish a special task
force to investigate the burglaries.
At one store in Houston, three
men crashed a truck through the
front window and stole dozens of
cell phones before speeding away.
At another store last year, a thief
lowered himself through the ceiling, grabbed as many handsets
as he could, then climbed back
through the ceiling to escape.
Last July, Anthony Riopelle, 22,
was working at a Meijer department store in Taylor, Mich., when
two men approached and started
asking about iPads. Suddenly, one
man punched Riopelle in the face,
knocking him to the ground, while
the other grabbed more than a
dozen tablets and fled the store,
according to police.
“They said, ‘If you move, we’re
going to kill you,’” Riopelle told
HuffPost.
Police said they later found the
stolen iPads behind the bulletproof
glass window at Ace Wholesale.
The two thieves were never caught.
It was not the only time police
tracked stolen mobile devices to
There are lots of consumers
walking around with phones
they think they got legitimately
… when in fact the phones were
stolen during armed robberies.
Ace Wholesale. In August, Taylor
police arrested a man in the company’s parking lot shortly after he had
stolen iPhones from several victims
at gunpoint in Detroit.
“Ace Wholesale made it very
easy for people who were obtaining
phones through robberies and retail fraud to go there and sell them,”
Taylor police Chief Mary Sclabassi
told HuffPost. “It brought a large