This is the moment a brazen e-bike bandit swoops in and tries to snatch a phone from an unsuspecting woman outside Waterloo station.
The masked rider, dressed in black, almost grabs the device from the woman in a split second manoeuvre outside the central London train station at around 3am.
Shocking footage, filmed through a parked car windscreen, shows the thief quickly sneak up on the woman as she was scrolling on her phone.
He tries to violently rip it from her grasp but sped off down the road after failing to take the phone on October 29.
The attempted theft is the latest in a string of daily phone raids that has left London facing a spiralling phone crime epidemic.
In the video, a man who witnessed the incident said: ‘Right guys, look at this. There’s a bike coming round the corner.
‘Watch how quickly he tries to do this. I saw him coming up and I didn’t know whether he was going to do it or not.
‘But when he spun around behind me, I beeped my car horn. You might see the woman move a little bit when I beep my horn.
This is the moment a brazen e-bike bandit swoops in and tries to snatch a phone from an unsuspecting woman outside Waterloo station
The masked rider, dressed in black, almost grabs the device from the woman in a split second manoeuvre outside the central London train station at around 3am
‘And look, he tried to grab her phone…and gone. But yeah, she was paying no attention.’
Phone thefts in London have exploded in recent years.
There were 116,656 reported mobile thefts in 2024 – the highest number on record – and more than 50 per cent higher than the total in 2017 of just over 77,000.
Last year’s total was equivalent to 13 phones being stolen every hour – and it was 1,300 incidents higher than in the previous 12 months.
Despite the number of thefts, only 169 suspects were charged in the year, and seven were let off with a caution.
The figures, obtained from the Met under freedom of information laws by campaign group Crush Crime, also showed a further 8,588 handset thefts in January this year.
Some 61,000 of victims were female and just under 48,000 were male, with the rest not recorded. From 2017 to 2024 the total number of mobile phones reported stolen was almost 684,000 – and they were estimated to have a value of £365million.
The number of phone thefts climbed to 91,000 in 2019 but dipped during lockdowns. It then went on to exceed the pre-Covid total in 2023, with just over 115,000 thefts.
Fortunately, the attempted thief failed and rapidly sped away, leaving the stunned woman behind
In October, the Met revealed police had disrupted an international network suspected of smuggling tens of thousands of stolen phones from the UK in its largest operation to tackle phone theft in London.
The criminal organisation is believed to have smuggled up to 40,000 stolen phones from the UK to China over the past 12 months – up to 40 per cent of all phones stolen in the capital.
The force launched Operation Echosteep in December 2024 after a box containing about 1,000 iPhones being shipped to Hong Kong was found at a warehouse near Heathrow Airport.
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said they had no report of the attempted phone snatch outside Waterloo on October 29.