You are walking calmly, listening to music through your mobile phone, when it is already getting dark, with the device in the front pocket of your trousers, as the mandatory precautions in any city like Barcelona dictate, along a street in the district of Raval, just one island from Sant Antoni…
And suddenly, in front of a colmado, among the people entering and leaving the establishment, on the narrow sidewalk, three men subtly surround you, you feel a shadow hovering over your back… and suddenly, before you can realize what’s really happening, you stop listening to music. what the hell Has Spotify crashed? You put your hand in the front pocket of your pants and discover that the headphone cable is dangling, that your phone has suddenly disappeared, that someone… “Did you steal my cell phone?”, you ask, still in disbelief, to all three men How is it possible that they disconnected the cable and took the device from your pocket in a single gesture?
“What? – answer the three young men in tracksuits – No one has stolen from you here, watch what you say…”. “Who has it? – you ask them, still bewildered, still impressed. Give it back to me!”. Then all three begin to back away, step by step, each in a different direction, and you don’t know which way to turn. Then one escapes and starts the race, and you chase him, making screeches that steal your air. After three corners the trace disappears. “And the others?”, you ask, breathless. bad lightning
Ronaldinho’s days are behind us. The headphone cable method is now carried. The pandemic made cards so widespread as a means of payment that people barely carry cash on them. Wallets don’t look so juicy anymore. And opportunistic thieves are refining their techniques to get as many mobile devices as possible. The cable tells them which pocket the device is in. The technique of snatching the device from the victims’ hands while they are typing and running away at full speed no longer works. The main referents of these criminals are watchmakers.
Most of the victims of these new methods spend a few seconds looking at the headphone cable, wondering what happened, and then around them, circling, not knowing anything. I dropped my phone…? And if you surprise them in fraganti, the thieves, they leave quietly, without drawing attention, very naturally. Some even put their hands together in apology as they walk away. We are talking about a crime on the rise that generates a great feeling of public insecurity. In addition, many of these crimes are hidden. These paragraphs are the result of a handful of citizen witnesses. There are not a few victims who do not have insurance, prefer to avoid the queue at the police station and refuse to report the incident.
“My wife was robbed on a bus in Sarrià , around eight in the morning, when she was taking the children to school – explains another victim. We went in and a man sitting on the rollaway bed in the stroller area offered his seat to one of my children, and at the same time a woman sitting next to him offered her seat to the other. My wife stood between the two of them and immediately said to me ‘call me, they took my mobile phone out of my handbag’. The phone rang for a moment… And I told the man that we had been robbed, and he denied it, said it must have been the woman, and they both got off the bus! You don’t know what to do. So I turned on the Apple locator on my wife’s phone and saw that she was walking away from the bus. So I went down and…â€
In this way, a chase begins through the streets of Sarrià , following the dot marked by the locator. It is an iPhone 13 Pro valued at around 1,500 euros. Parents with busy hands are other targets of these thieves. “But with the lag it was impossible to catch them – this citizen continues -. After ten minutes I lost the signal… I understood that it had been turned off, that I had lost the possibility of finding it. Until an hour later, when we were already buying another one, the locator was activated again on the phone. It was in a block in the Florida neighborhood of 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, bluffed myself and told the thief that I had pictures of him, to give me the phone back. ..â€.
The criminals then took the opportunity to send to the phone that was the sender of the warning an SMS that appeared to be from Apple, saying that the phone was connected again and that it took you to a website almost identical to that of iCloud which it asked you for the pin number and also the password to unlock your device. The domain also looked authentic. But it was actually a script created by hackers that anyone can download after a simple internet search.
“I sniffed it and put a few wrong numbers. In the end they turned off the phone.” If the victim bites the hook, the criminals manage to release the world’s most inaccessible mobile device. Then, they can easily sell it for more than a thousand euros. Otherwise they can try to scam an unwary on the second-hand market or simply resell it for parts.
Researchers from the Mossos d’Esquadra detail that these devices are thus transformed into spare parts in murky repair shops, businesses that offer people much lower prices than official services. “Apple’s have a security system that makes them inaccessible”, indicate these researchers from the Generalitat police. Do you remember the murder of the young Madrid girl Diana Quer in 2016? A shellfisherman found her iPhone on a dock in Tarragona. Not even the Civil Guard could access it. And in view of the multinational’s lack of complicity, they had to turn to Cellebrite, an Israeli company located in Munich, the same one that had already unlocked the iPhone of the author of the San Bernardino massacre in 2015.
The investigators of these crimes add that the phones that work with the Android operating system are more accessible. “Around 80% of these devices end up sold abroad, mainly in Morocco. And the rest are sold on the local black market or on second-hand buying and selling platformsâ€.
