Home Office takes non-action against phone pinchers
Does nothing new to stop green thieves maybe making a mint
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The Home Office is demanding that mobile phone recyclers continue what they're already doing, in the name of cracking down on mobile phone theft.
The office is busy creating a new Code of Practice which will require the industry to check handsets sent for recycling against the register of stolen phones, preventing thieves cashing in on the £25 average value of a handset. Which would be most laudable, it if wasn't happening already.
The fact is that few handsets sent for recycling get broken up for parts - the majority are shipped to developing countries where last year's model can still be sold for a profit. But an increasing number of those countries are now signed up to the international database of stolen phones, so recyclers (or, more accurately, resellers) have to check against the database anyway.
The Home Office cites "due diligence specialists" Recipero saying that 100,000 stolen handsets turn up for recycling every year, and at an average price of £25, that adds up to a possible £2.5m in ill-gotten gains. Recipero runs the Immobilise database of stolen items on behalf of the UK police, and the company tells us that most recycling companies already check the database so they've got a good handle on the number of stolen handsets that turn up.
But that also means those stolen phones aren't being recycled resold, so no one is paying out the £2.5m - the criminals aren't getting away with it.
So the plan appears to be for some civil servants to sit round and write up guidelines over a few cups of coffee, whereupon the Home Office Minister gets to appear tough on the industry, which reluctantly accepts the demands to continue doing exactly what it was already doing - and everyone wins. As you were. ®
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COMMENTS
Working for a telco..
Its a shame the customer does not get the chance to register their IMEI number and name and address (if its not on contract) so that if the phone is recovered something can be done with it.
We get a lot of old grannies out walking their dog who phone up with a found phone to try and find its owner... sure, we can take the IMEI but we have nothing to search it against (I'm sure the IMEI's are logged but we can neither search them or find out who they belong to.
We also get a lot of police phoning up doing the same.
Even if we did have such a database, under DPA we'd be unable to do anything about it anyway.
I think it would be lovely to get a call. look up a database - make a call and say "Hi its x from x, your phone has just been recovered, would you like the contact info? OR would you like to pick it up from your nearest store or for £10 admin we can post it to your nearest one..."
Big thrill, IMEI blocking has reduced the interest in stealing mobiles but it does nothing to get the handset back to the correct owner and it really should not be so hard.
Not quite right
Thanks for an interesting article however some of the facts are muddled, perhaps this will help.
Firstly the majority of companies that “recycle” phones do not recycle them in the traditional way.
As you say they are shipped abroad to developing nations to be used as second owner handsets, this is because the cost of new handsets in these countries is outside the reach of most of the population.
As a result in the UK most of these companies have moved to a “buy” rather than a “denote” model to acquire handsets and this has attracted the attention of thieves as an easy way to turn stolen phones into cash. This model is now extending to laptops, sat navs, iPhones etc as there is a market in the developing world for these as well.
The problem has been that in the case of a mobile there are two flags that indicate to a “recycler” that they should not be handling the handset. One is a crime report where the Police have been informed by the owner the handset has been stolen and the second is a blocked report where the owner has told the network they are no longer is possession of the handset and its has been blocked on the UK networks, however they have not told the Police. Both these flags are available to the “recyclers” the second hand trade and the public via the service at www.checkmend.com
Before the advent of the Recyclers Charter the legal status of these blocked handsets has been a grey area and many (but not all) recyclers have been selling these abroad to countries that don’t use the network block list to identify stolen phones, hence they will work on networks in these countries.
This is where the figure of 100,000 phones a year comes from with an average value of £25 per handset and it is this trade that will be stopped.
The recent developments of the Charter has clarified the legal status of a blocked phone and these are to be regarded in the same way as handsets reported to the Police, and as a result must not be handled or sold by recyclers, second hand outlets, the public or retailers. Doing so will leave the seller open to prosecution for handling stolen goods.
This is a major step forward in reducing the outlets for stolen phones and as a result reducing the appeal to steal them in the first place.
I hope this helps.
Thanks
Adrian Portlock
Managing Director
Recipero Limited Supplier of CheckMEND and the National Mobile Phone Register.
Because
These checks are fairly easy to perform and supposedly have an effect on theft levels. So why wouldn't you do them?
If you turn up a major car dealer rather than a purely second-hand place they will all perform proper background checks on the vehicle they are buying off you because it's almost certainly in their licence conditions from the manufacturer they represent - in the same way that if you try to use more than a certain amount of cash to pay for a vehicle they have to report it in case you are trying to launder money.
Mobile phones are by and large useless without a service, so blocking them from using the service reduces their potential resale value without the application of specialist knowledge.
If the motor industry operated in a similar fashion then every vehicle would be bought on a kind of lease/HP agreement with some bundled "road miles" that you could drive for free and out-of-plan ones you could pay for as needed. The vehicle would then need some way of reliably being allowed to access roads and the driver billed for extra miles. So,if your vehicle was stolen you could call Vodaroad (or whoever), report it stolen and they could block it's access to the road network.
What would that do for car crime?
Yes, you'd still need the Police, but they can redirect their energies to other detection and prevention activities if you can make certain types of crime pointless. Generally vehicles are stolen for resale, joyriding and for use in other crimes (usually to carry away the spoils of other thefts) and they sometimes tangled up in quite a few motoring offences on the way. If you could effectively limit the useful life of a stolen vehicle to (say) 12 hours or even less, how many motor vehicle thefts would be avoided altogether and how many of the associated crimes would also go away?
Do you get it now?
Actually, there's a possibility to do this with electric cars by including some kind of handshake in the charging station equipment. Privacy concerns aside you could eventually get to a situation where you could prevent an electric vehicle from being charged if it was stolen. On the face of it that could be a good idea.
Where do I get a blank patent form?
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