How I tracked my stolen iPhone to a prison hub in China

Listen! I’m going to harass, wreck and ruin your sad, stupid low pathetic life… you mindless peasant,’ read the text message.

It went on: ‘Ur whole family will get slaughtered I’m going to f***ing beat and rape u horribly you f***ing piece of absolute garbage’.

‘I’m angry now, don’t mess with me, and if you don’t do what I say, you’re going to have negroes coming to your house Wednesday night, and I’m going to kill your whole family.’

I looked at my phone, horrified. The message had been sent from an anonymous email address – a jumble of letters and numbers followed by ‘@gmail.com’ – via Apple’s messaging service, iMessage.

I was shaken by the tone of the text, but not afraid.

For this was one in a series of menacing messages I’d received and by now I had worked out the death threats were empty.

I knew, too, that the sender was far away in southern China – one small link in the country’s enormous black market for stolen iPhones.

Let me explain. It all started a month before, on a sunny March day – Thursday 14, to be precise – when I had been browsing Zara on London’s High Street Kensington during my lunch break.

The shop was quiet and my relatively new iPhone 15 was in my pocket. Then I sensed two women behind me, both holding hangers of clothing so I couldn’t see their faces.

When one of them bumped into me, I knew immediately what had happened. I checked my coat pocket, and my phone was gone. I looked around startled – too late, because the women had disappeared, too.

Anyone who’s had a similar experience will know the feeling: a sinking stomach, panic and then fury. Just this week, former tennis star Annabel Croft said she was ‘traumatised’ after having her phone snatched out of her hands by a yob riding an e-bike.

‘I was so shocked. It was terrifying. I would hate anyone to have that same experience,’ the Strictly Come Dancing star told ITV’s This Morning.

Knowing that the bank cards I had saved on the phone and my personal data were more valuable than the handset itself, I briefly told the store’s security guard what had happened before sprinting back to my office, where, using my desktop computer, I cancelled my bank cards.

Crucially, I used Apple’s ‘Find My’ app, which comes downloaded on to every Apple device and which is accessible by desktop, allowing users to mark a phone as ‘lost’, which I did.

This app can completely erase and then lock your Apple devices remotely, protecting the data and information stored on them.

It also gives you the option to remove a device completely from your Apple account – which allows it to be used by another person.

But if you don’t remove the device then it will always remain locked, massively reducing its usefulness. The ‘Find My’ app additionally uses a combination of cellular data, Wi-Fi and GPS to show exactly where your phone is.

By the time I logged in – ten minutes or so after the thieves had pocketed it, my phone’s location wasn’t showing. Presumably, they had switched off the phone – thereby disconnecting it from the internet and concealing its location.

In marking your iPhone as lost, you can also display a message on your locked phone’s home screen, including a contact number, which will help someone return your iPhone to you in case it’s found by police or a member of the public.

I put down my own phone number – anticipating that, having cancelled my old SIM card and blocked my stolen iPhone, I’d be able to source a new handset and SIM with the same number within the next few days.

I did. And apart from feeling a little traumatised by the ordeal, I moved on.

Until, that is, I started receiving those messages.

The first came on April 21, just over a month after my phone had been stolen.

It was from the email address ‘[email protected]’ and read: ‘Your iPhone 15 is trying to pay with Apple Pay in China to ensure the safety of your accounts.

‘Please use “Find My” App to remove your Apple id and cancel your payment method as soon as possible.’

Another moment of panic. Had, somehow, my phone reached someone in China who was trying to use my Apple Pay (the contactless payment system on iPhones) to spend my money?

I quickly checked my ‘Find My’ app, to see if the location of the phone had updated. Lo and behold, I could see its exact location for the first time in weeks. Astonishingly, it was in China – in the ‘World Trade Plaza’, a skyscraper housing a giant mall, on Fuhong Road, in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong – 8,000 miles away.

I Googled whether I should follow the advice in the message and ‘remove’ my phone from my Apple account, which would allow it to be used by someone else.

The answer was categorically no. An expert on Apple’s website said: ‘As long as the device remains on your Apple account, it can’t be re-used by anyone else. So do not remove it.’

Other advice suggested that any of my data that might be left on the handset would be far better protected if the phone stayed locked.

The next evening, I received another message – this time from a phone number with a Philippines dialling code.

It said: ‘Yo!! I’ve bought an iPhone 15 I’m using, I have your messages, emails, cards, bank, notes and personal information on it. I get your calls. It was not erased.’

And a second message immediately afterwards: ‘I’m telling you this because the phone is going be auctioned on the black market with your personal information and everything about you that you had on it. All your info including your phone number, address, everything will be cloned.

‘That’s why I’m telling you to so you can REMOVE IT from your device list.’

It’s everybody’s worst nightmare – that all your passwords, photos and messages could be accessed by a stranger.

Despite the threatening undertones, I held firm – trusting that as long as my phone remained locked through my Apple account, my data would be safe.

That night, at 11.17pm, I received more messages.

The thief was now posing as a desperate parent: ‘I am very sad now, this is an old iPhone I bought in a second-hand electrical appliance market in China, which I bought for my daughter. Would you please help me remove it? Thank you very much indeed.’

And moments later: ‘I’m sad, my daughter is angry because she didn’t go to school today, I want to kill myself now, I don’t know what to do, please, help me, remove it, OK?’

For the first time, human instinct compelled me to reply.

‘Don’t kill yourself’, I wrote back. ‘Why do you need me to remove it?’

The thief did not reply. As it was clear this was a scam, I didn’t unlock the phone.

Then next day, the tone changed dramatically: ‘Listen! I’m going to harassed, wreck and ruin your sad, stupid low pathetic life if its not removed you mindless peasant.

‘You’re going to be destroyed. I’ve killed for far less than a f***ing phone before and we will see if you value your life over this phone so you know how f***ing serious this is. I know who you are and where you live and ur whole family will get slaughtered i’m going to f***ing beat and rape u horribly you f***ing piece of absolute garbage. waste of air. waste of skin u and ur family im gone f***ing murder y’all watch me.’

‘Oh and the police? they cannot help you, they’ll only take your f***ing statement. And this number is a f***ing burner. Your best option is to f***ing remove it now. I’m angry now, don’t mess with me, and if you don’t do what I say, you’re going to have negroes coming to your house Wednesday night, and I’m going to kill your whole family

‘I already told you what to do, and if you don’t get it removed by the end of the day, Miami gonna be looking for you and your family, and you f***ing blame me for not warning you.’

Then followed the video. As if the texts weren’t intimidating enough, the scammer sent me a 25-second video in which he showed off a handgun and its cartridge while roaming around a dirty bathroom.

‘You n****s better stop playing with me’, he drawled in an American accent.

Alarmed, I searched the internet for people who had experienced similar threats. What I found was astonishing: on messaging forum Reddit, as well as Apple’s own support forum, there were hundreds of people who had received exactly the same messages as me.

And even more remarkably, users pickpocketed across the world – from Bristol, Paris, Brussels and Valencia to Las Vegas and Los Angeles – reported that their stolen phone had ended up within precisely the same square mile as mine in Shenzhen, China.

The city is a hub for mobile phone manufacturers and wholesalers – the Silicon Valley of the Orient. Until recent years, it was the centre of manufacturing for Apple components, housing a 1.4 square-mile plant owned by Foxconn – one of Apple’s biggest suppliers.

Following the shocking revelation in 2010 that there had been a spate of suicides at its Chinese factories, large nets were installed outside many of the buildings to catch jumpers.

Shenzen’s electronics district is made up of sprawling multi-level malls – more than 30 of them – and bustling bazaars, all packed full of phone vendors selling computer chips, circuit boards, sensors, phone casings and cameras.

As Brian Merchant, author of new book The One Device: The Secret History Of The iPhone, who visited one of the many malls in the district, puts it: ‘You have to see it to believe it. I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one place — not at an Apple Store, not raised by the crowd at a rock concert, not at the Consumer Electronics Show.

‘Some booths are tricked-out repair stalls where young men and women examine iPhones with magnifying lenses and disassemble them with an array of tiny tools.

‘Another table has a huge pile of silver bitten-Apple logos that a man is separating and meting out. And it’s packed full of shoppers, buyers, repair people, all talking and smoking and poring over iPhone paraphernalia.’

And, while much of the industry in Shenzhen is legitimate, it harbours a huge black market for stolen iPhones.

Which brings me to two questions: How did my phone get to China, and why are the people who have it so desperate for me to disconnect it from my Apple account? Having spoken to police and Home Office officials, this seems to be how the operation unfolds: the petty thieves who pickpocket or mug people in big cities are often working in co-ordination with a sophisticated gang.

Phones collected by these gangs are often sold in bulk online, either directly by the gang or a second party, and bought up by Chinese warehouses. And with lax exit checks at UK borders, it appears hundreds of stolen iPhones can be smuggled to China directly in a suitcase via plane or by sea on shipping containers, which take about a month to arrive.

Border Force declined to comment on the scale of the problem.

With one iPhone stolen every ten minutes in London alone, according to the Metropolitan Police, that’s a lot of handsets.

They then arrive at a gigantic phone warehouses in China – the majority of which are in Shenzhen – where the shadowy figures who run them are either looking for parts or think they can crack into the phones, wipe and resell them.

B ut phones that arrive locked to an Apple account are all but useless. They are of no value unless they are broken down into parts and put back together to create a ‘frankenphone’ – a non-official, and often glitchy, handset that is then sold, dirt cheap, on online marketplaces.

Traders working in these malls and warehouses are so skilled at breaking down and reassembling phones with a mix of parts that they can cobble together a phone in as little as five minutes.

While an official iPhone 15 new from Apple costs around £800, a good-condition, second-hand phone disconnected from an Apple account will set you back around £600.

When they are ‘rebuilt’ however, you can buy a franken-handset from Shenzhen for as little as 500 Chinese Renminbi (£55).

Which is why, if they can get hold of a contact number (in my case, my phone number appeared on the phone’s lockscreen) cash- hungry traders resort to sending threatening messages to the owner demanding they disconnect the phone from their Apple account.

Following that last, vile message, I heard nothing more from my phone’s new Chinese owners – nor can I see its location any more.

I can only imagine that it has been broken down in a warehouse and its components are being used to spawn dozens of fraudulent handsets.

So, while the Met police report that nearly 52,000 devices were stolen in the UK capital last year, as criminals use increasingly violent and elaborate methods to target victims, it appears that the beating heart of our phone theft epidemic is 8,000 miles away.

And one thing I do know: never, ever remove your stolen iPhone from your Apple account.