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Collin McMinn stood in a dense crowd at III Points music festival in Miami when two large men shoved through his group of friends. His iPhone 13 was gone within seconds, swiped from his pocket in the chaos.
“I hate that I’m so connected to my phone, like most of society, but that immediate anxiety and scared feeling was very prominent,” McMinn said.
Police officers stationed around the festival told McMinn that he was about the 30th person to report a stolen phone — and there was nothing they could do.
When he returned to his hotel, his fiancée received an unexpected call from the stolen phone. “Apparently some kid tackled the dude that had my phone,” McMinn said.
Jacob Jomarron had wrapped his arm around the thief’s neck, tripping the man with his foot and slamming him to the concrete. He frantically patted the pickpocket’s clothes, lifting up the thief’s shirt to reveal a bodysuit — and 25 phones, strapped to the criminal’s chest, arms and back.
The thief then vanished into the crowd, Jomarron and McMinn’s iPhones clattering on the ground as he ran.
“We waited, stayed up and (Jomarron) walked to the hotel, brought (my phone) to me,” McMinn said. “I gave him 50 bucks because he’s such a champ for that. And I made a friend out of it.”
Jomarron and McMinn’s story is just one example of a nationwide phone theft crisis that has taken hold in South Florida. Thieves are trained in elaborate pickpocketing techniques, distracting victims by shoving them or pretending to flirt with them. They grab phones from purses and pockets at nightclubs and music festivals, sending smartphones overseas to be stripped for parts, and putting the owners’ critical information at risk as they pillage financial institutions and saved passwords.
Most victims are women, tourists, or young people, groups who consistently take out their phone and are followed by pickpockets. In Fort Lauderdale, the number of phone theft reports skyrockets during Spring Break, usually between the hours of midnight to 4 a.m.
How thefts happen
Walking through a dance floor can be dangerous. While clubbers are enjoying a song and holding their hands in the air during a beat drop, thieves take advantage of the moment.
“Crowds would be an effective choice (for thieves) too; you have to be able to move through them relatively quickly and get out,” Michigan State criminal justice professor Tom Holt said. “Any kind of space where it’s dark, you’re not necessarily paying a ton of attention. You might be more inclined to put it down on a seat or a table and you take a drink.”
Some criminals may sell a phone to a local vendor, similar to jewelry being swiped and sold at a pawn shop. Other thieves are part of sophisticated groups, putting phones in airplane mode and inside electromagnetic blocking Faraday bags so the phones cannot be detected with tracking features.
“Normally it’s not one person, it’s one, two, or three people distracting and one actually handling the phone and either taking off or giving it to somebody else. Even in a nightclub there has to be somebody on watch,” said Mehran Basiratmand, director of programs and innovation at Florida Atlantic University. He previously spent 22 years as the chief technology officer for the university.
When multiple phones are reported as stolen at Club Space in Miami, security waves people with handheld metal detectors as they exit the nightclub.
“If they have multiple phones on them, we will make them unlock the phone,” former Club Space and Factory Town bouncer Zarrian White said.
Factory Town, a multi-stage music venue in Hialeah, had 18 larceny reports in 2022 but leaped to 90 reports in 2024. Despite the number of theft reports, the venue is open only a select few nights of the year for special events like New Year’s Eve.
Fort Lauderdale Police received 1,282 cellphone theft reports in 2023 and 1,050 reports in 2024. The locations with the most thefts include Dicey Riley’s Irish Pub, Sway, Munchie’s, Cafe Ibiza, and Rock Bar.
“There’s certain (phone stealing) crews. We have quite a few South American crews, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba coming up,” said Patrick O’Brien, a Fort Lauderdale sergeant in charge of larceny. “These are the groups that infiltrate Tortuga Music Festival, but they don’t just infiltrate Tortuga; they’re looking for nationwide music festivals, things like Mardi Gras, looking for large crowds that are going to be people really squeezed together.”
The business of stealing phones
The rise of phone thieves can be linked to the increased cost of cellphones. Due to the high turnover rates as new models of phones are released, there is always a resale market for used smartphones. Apple’s newest model, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, currently sells for $1,199. Replacing a cracked iPhone screen could cost $400.
“If vendors can get the screens cheaply from stolen phones, they’ll take them apart and sell the parts. If you’re a third-party vendor that fixes phones, if you can get the screen for example, you get a great discount, you can then make a larger profit, and fix the phones,” said Thomas Hyslip, assistant professor of instruction at the University of South Florida’s cybercrime program. Hyslip spent 23 years in federal law enforcement for cybercrime investigations and digital forensics.
Although iPhones are targeted for their large user base and high resale prices, older models of all phone brands still contain pieces that can be refurbished by experts. In addition to screens, there is a high demand for modem chips that allow devices to connect to the internet.
Cameras and phone cases are resold as well. Because components such as the screen are needed to make the device functional, there is nothing that can be done to lower a phone’s value to thieves.
“I’m assuming they’re getting hundreds of dollars for each one. So if they go out and get five phones in a night, they pay $1,000. It’s a pretty good night for those people,” Hyslip said.
In July 2023, Cody Szymanski left his phone in an Uber in Wilton Manors. It traveled to Miami before being tracked to China three months later. After almost a year and a half of no updates, it pinged for the final time in January 2025. The phone had landed in Shenzhen, a high-tech city known as the Silicon Valley of China.
“It was in that area where everybody’s phone ends up. It’s like they go back to the motherland,” Szymanski said.
Shenzhen, China: The motherland of stolen phones
China is the world’s largest market for both new and used smartphones, according to Adam Minter, an author of two books on secondhand industries who lived in China for 12 years as a recycling and reuse correspondent. Hong Kong is on the border of Shenzhen, and due to the concentration of market demand, the cities have become global hubs for the resale and distribution of secondhand phones.
“You have hundreds of thousands of people who have grown up working, learning within the smartphone industry. They’ve worked the lines, they’ve worked in the labs, and they know intricately how to refurbish a used phone so that it looks new,” Minter said. “They have access to a massive parts ecosystem. Remember, most of the world’s phones are made in the Pearl River Delta, which comprises Shenzhen and Hong Kong.”
People who work at legitimate warehouses manufacturing phones may spend their nights or their weekends taking apart stolen phones at third-party factories, according to Hyslip.
“Probably the person who stole your phone in Miami has no real connection to Shenzhen other than maybe they make a drop shipment of 10 phones a month into Hong Kong or Shenzhen,” Minter said. “But that’s not a vast criminal enterprise. That’s something much harder to crack.”
When Sgt. O’Brien began investigating the phone theft problem in Fort Lauderdale, he contacted the FBI. They told him they have a liaison in China working on the case.
Although a phone’s location may ping for the last time in Shenzhen, the parts stripped from a device can be sent all over the world, to places such as West Africa or the Middle East.
Because a majority of stolen phones are shipped to China, there is little the United States can do besides taking extreme legal action, such as economic sanctions, against the country, according to Holt. While the U.S. could engage in small-scale takedowns of pickpockets, it would do little to halt the sweeping network that supports the thefts.
“We could do more, but it’s very hard to do anything that has real teeth given the problem is domestically within China with fingers out to different local groups that are scoring the broader items in different countries,” Holt said.
Personal data at risk
If a phone is locked with a passcode, personal data remains safe. Apple allows for a remote data wipe of stolen phones through the Find My tracking feature.
“The best stuff you can get on an encrypted phone is you might be able to get any phone number, the model, the manufacturer, the self service provider. But you’re not going to get any personal data, no text messages, no pictures, nothing like that without advanced techniques that law enforcement uses,” Hyslip said.
If the device is unlocked, the risk is far greater. Although it is useful to have usernames and passwords stored inside the phone, safety is sacrificed for convenience. The multifactor authentication that is used to log into everything from banking apps to homework portals involves a code being sent to the phone number, blocking people from accessing important information on their computers.
“(Criminals) get into the financial institution, get credit card information, buy items on the credit card. If people have their Apple Pay or Google Pay configured on their phone, it could be an authorized use of the device,” Basiratmand said.
Not every theft occurs at a music festival or a nightclub. Amy Alvarez had her Samsung Galaxy phone and her wallet swiped at a HomeGoods store in Sunrise in 2024. While one man distracted her by holding up pillows, the other went inside her purse. She chased the thief outside the building and asked an officer to help her. The officer said that they weren’t assigned to Sunrise and that Alvarez would have to wait for other police to arrive.
“How do I call the places to cancel my credit cards? (Police officers said to) go home and use your husband’s phone,” Alvarez said. “I don’t have a husband. I don’t have children. I don’t have anybody; where am I supposed to go to call to cancel my credit cards?”
Alvarez’s phone and wallet were returned when a shopper found them hidden between racks of pillows. Similarly, Brittany Lawerence found her stolen iPhone 15 inside a plastic planter on the street in Wynwood in Miami. She used Apple’s Find My feature to track it after it was swiped from a table at Coyo Taco.
“Sometimes they’ll shut it off and they don’t want to walk around with stolen property for fear of possibly being stopped by the police, so what they’ll do is they’ll drop them off somewhere,” O’Brien said. “Two years ago we found a bag of stolen phones from downtown in a plastic bag on the side of the road and some bushes.”
The perils of losing a phone
Having a phone stolen can quickly put people in a dangerous situation. Phone numbers of friends and family members are not always memorized, and Generation Z relies on Apple Pay without carrying credit cards or cash.
“It turns into a safety issue, not only is this person’s personal information potentially going with the phone, so is their ability to contact their friends or to contact an Uber to get them back to their safe place,” Fort Lauderdale Police Department spokesperson Casey Liening said.
A lost phone offers an especially difficult challenge for tourists, who often have airline tickets, hotel check-in information and itinerary details stored digitally. If they are traveling solo, the tourist is trapped in a foreign country, possibly in a place where no one speaks English, navigating the process of transferring their phone number without a way to communicate.
While many have a contingency plan for lost luggage, stashing underwear and toothpaste in a carry-on, that same level of care is not applied to packing an additional cheap smartphone.
“Normally when I travel overseas, I always have a second phone with me just in case something happens,” Basiratmand said. “I have literally two numbers. Call me paranoid, but one is normally in the hotel and the other one’s with me. In case something happens, I can easily block the other number and make sure nobody can get to my phone.”
Losing a phone results in the stress of transferring a phone number, redownloading data, remembering the passwords for apps, and verifying security questions for financial institutions. According to Basiratmand, people use their phones for over four hours a day as an entertainment, educational, and productivity tool.
“People take (phones) for granted. I notice most people, unless they lose it, they don’t appreciate how much hassle it is to kind of get to the point where they could actually fully utilize their device,” Basiratmand said.
Although people take precautions while carrying a luxury handbag, the same attitude is not applied to cellphones. It is common to misplace a phone, asking a friend to call it as couch cushions are overturned.
“We wouldn’t wave a thousand dollars in cash around publicly, but we do that with our phone all the time,” Holt said.
Police involvement
Even if a phone can be tracked to an exact address, police will not raid the home.
“We need a lot of evidence; you would need a positive identification on a suspect that walked in there,” O’Brien said. “iPhones, although the GPS is pretty accurate, a judge really won’t sign off on a search warrant unless you have more than just the phone pinging at that address, because in the past, it’s been shown that the pinging is not accurate. It could be the house next door.”
Victims can apply for a search warrant, which could take three to five days, according to Hyslip. By that time, the phone may be enroute to China, and many search warrant requests do not get approved at all.
“The police have limited resources and it’s a thousand dollars; it’s a lot of work for them to get that search warrant. It’s a low-value loss. You go look for someone’s car or you go look for a stolen phone,” Hyslip said.
Fort Lauderdale has been cracking down on phone thefts, keeping track of stolen phone statistics instead of generalizing thefts under the broad category of larceny. Undercover cops populate downtown bars and music festivals, and public awareness campaigns about pickpockets have been implemented. The police made an effort to halt phone thefts at Tortuga after they caught 23 stolen phones in 2022. Only eight phones were reported as stolen in 2024 as opposed to 204 phones in 2022.
“If you know you’re going to be in a heavily crowded area like a bar or a music festival, we just want you to be hyper-aware that there are also people there to specifically target stealing cellphones,” Liening said.
How to prevent a phone theft
- Never keep your phone in your pocket.
- Don’t wear a low-hanging bag. Ensure that the zipper is protected by your armpit. Anti-theft hydration backpacks are a good choice for music festivals.
- Wear a fanny pack.
- No matter what kind of bag you have, protect the zipper with your hand when navigating through extremely crowded areas.
- Hide your phone in a flip belt underneath your clothes.
- Utilize a phone wrist strap or a bag tether.
- Bring cash or credit cards instead of relying on Apple Pay.
- Never keep your credit card or ID inside your phone case.
- Memorize reliable phone numbers to call if your phone is stolen.
- Take out your phone as little as possible.
- Purchase phone theft insurance.
- Password-protect your phone lockscreen.
- Never auto-save passwords to financial institutions.
- Regularly back up photos, messages and other data.
- When changing locations, ensure that you have your phone and that your bag is zipped closed.
Once your phone is stolen
- Notify venue security or nearby police officers.
- Check the location of the phone using tracking features.
- Remotely erase the phone to protect personal data.
- Cancel credit cards and notify financial institutions.
- Do not send the password to unlock it even if you receive threatening text messages–your data will be stolen.
- Transfer phone number to a new device and download recovered data.
