County lines gangs have turned to snatching phones instead of dealing drugs to feed a growing £70m a year epidemic.
Gang members are grooming vulnerable young people to steal mobiles on Britain’s streets due to unprecedented overseas demand and softer sentences for those who are caught.
Stolen phones are being shipped abroad in bulk and sold around the world, a police chief warned, with some 80 per cent of the 80,000 phones stolen every year in London ending up overseas.
A Mail investigation today tracks a phone stolen from an estate agent on the capital’s famous Baker Street across the globe to a high-rise block in Hong Kong, where it sat alongside hundreds of thousands of other handsets.
And a police chief in charge suggested the likes of Apple and Google had the gift to stop the trade by making a phone worthless after being taken.
