You are walking quietly, listening to music on your mobile phone at nightfall, with the device in the front pocket of your pants, as required by the mandatory precautions in any city like Barcelona, down a street in the Raval neighborhood, just one block away from Sant Antoni...
And suddenly, in front of a grocery store, among the people going in and out of the establishment, on the narrow sidewalk, three men subtly surround you, you feel a shadow hanging over your back... and suddenly, before you you can't figure out what's really happening, you stop listening to music, what the hell?, Spotify crashed?, what...?, and you put your hand in your front pants pocket and discover that the cable of your headphones are hanging loose, that suddenly your phone disappeared, that someone... "Have you stolen my mobile?", you ask, still incredulous, to the three men. How is it possible that they have disconnected the cable and removed the device from the pocket in a single gesture?
"That? –the three young men in tracksuits reply–... nobody has robbed you here, be careful what you say...”. "Who has it? – you ask them, still puzzled, still impressed – give it back to me!”. Then the three of them begin to go backwards, step by step, each one in a different direction, and you don't know which one to turn to. Then one scurries away and starts running, and you chase after him, yelling that takes your breath away. In three corners his trail disappears. “And the others?” you wonder, breathless. Curse.
Ronaldinho's times are falling behind. The headphone cable method is now carried over. The pandemic made cards so widespread as a means of payment that people hardly carry any money with them anymore. The handbags no longer seem so succulent. And clueless thieves are refining their techniques in order to get hold of the more mobile devices the better. The happy cable tells them in which pocket the device is. Snatching the device from the hands of the victims while they are typing and running away at full speed is no longer worth it. The great referents of these criminals are the watchmakers.
Most of the victims of these new methods stay for a few seconds looking at the cable of their headphones, wondering what... and then around them, circling, not knowing who the hell I dropped the phone... .? And if you catch them red-handed, the thieves, they leave calmly, without attracting attention, very naturally. Some even fold their hands in apology as they walk away. We are talking about a very rising crime that generates a great feeling of citizen insecurity. In addition, many of them remain hidden. These paragraphs are the result of a good handful of citizen testimonies. Many victims who do not have insurance prefer to skip the line at the police station and refuse to report what happened.
"My wife was robbed on a bus in Sarrià, around eight in the morning, taking the children to school," another victim recounted. We enter, and a man sitting in the folding car in the stroller area offers the seat to one of my children, and at the same time a woman sitting next to him offers hers to the other. My wife is in the middle and immediately she tells me 'call me, they have taken my mobile from my bag'. The phone rings for a moment... And I tell the man that he has robbed us, and he denies it, says that it must have been the woman, and they both get off the bus! You don't know what to do. So I start up the Apple locator for my wife's phone on my mobile and watch her walk away from the bus. So she put me down and ... ”.
Thus begins a chase through the streets of Sarrià, following the dot marked by the locator. It is an iPhone 13 Pro valued at about 1,500 euros. Parents with their hands full are another target for these thieves. “But with the gap it is impossible to reach it –continues this citizen–. After ten minutes I lose the signal... I understand that they have turned it off, that I have lost the possibility of finding it. Until an hour later, when I'm buying another one, the locator activates again. The phone is in a block in the Florida neighborhood of l'Hospitalet!, and since the locator allows you to send a warning message to the lost phone that can be read without unlocking it, I, well, bluff myself and tell the thief that I have photos of him, to give me back the phone...”.
The criminals then take the opportunity to send the phone that appears as the sender of the notice that you sent an SMS apparently from Apple, an SMS that tells you that your phone is connected again and that leads you to a website practically the same as the iCloud one that asks you the PIN number and also the password to unlock your device. The domain also seems authentic. But it is actually a script created by hackers that anyone can download after a simple search on the Internet.
“I smelled it and put a few wrong numbers. In the end they turned off the phone. If the victim takes the bait, the criminals manage to free the world's most inaccessible mobile device. So, they can easily sell it for more than a thousand euros. If not, they may try to rip off a gullible on the used market or simply resell it for parts.
Investigators from the Mossos d'Esquadra detail that these devices are thus transformed into spare parts in more shady repair shops, businesses that offer people prices much lower than those of official services. "Apple's have a security system that makes them inaccessible," continue these investigators from the Generalitat police. Do you remember the murder of the young Madrid woman Diana Quer in 2016? A shellfish woman found her iPhone on a Tarragona pier. Even the Civil Guard was able to access the device. And given the lack of complicity from the multinational, they had to resort to Cellebrite, an Israeli company located in Munich, the same one that had already unlocked the iPhone of the perpetrator of the San Bernardino massacre in 2015.
Investigators of these crimes add that phones that work with the Android operating system are more accessible. “About 80% of these devices end up being resold abroad, mainly in Morocco. And the rest, well, they are resold on the local black market or on second-hand trading platforms.”
