LONDON: The crime Alex Pikula reported to police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Pikula left a theatre in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his hands.
It was frustrating, Pikula thought, but that was that.
He was wrong.
His mother soon started receiving strange texts, claiming to have her son’s emails and bank information. Then she received a video of a man brandishing a gun. Then came threats of sexual assault and death.
“I know who you are and where you live,” read one, full of obscenities and typos. “I’ve killed or far less than a phone before,” it went on. “We will see if you value your life over this phone.”
All of the messages wanted her to do one thing: unlink her son’s Apple ID from his stolen phone.
A citywide scourge
Pikula knew the chances that police would recover his phone were slim.
A record 81,000 phones were reported stolen in London in 2024, the year Pikula, 37, was visiting from Chicago. Even though that number fell to about 71,000 last year, the scourge of thefts – and the police’s struggle to stop it – has made both residents and tourists uneasy.
Last year, London’s main police force, the Metropolitan Police, started focusing more on international networks that ship stolen phones to China, where the devices are sold on the black market.
There, the gangs can run into a problem. Unless unlinked from an Apple ID, they cannot reset the phone for a new buyer.
Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told reporters that criminals were trying to reset phones to take a new user’s ID.
“That is what gives it secondhand value,” he said.
“Otherwise,” said Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City St George’s, University of London, “that phone is almost worthless to them.” To criminals, she said in an interview, a phone bound to an existing Apple ID is good only for spare parts.
That is partly why police officials and experts urge victims to lock down and wipe stolen devices – without unlinking the ID – rather than meet their demands.
But for victims and their families, that advice can seem easier said than done.
‘Yo!!’
The first confusing text to Pikula’s mother, Judi Pikula, appeared to come from Apple Pay.
Someone was trying to use the phone in China, it said. The Apple ID had to be unlinked for the safety of her son’s financial accounts.
Days later, a chirpy message arrived from another phone number, this one with the Philippines’ country code.
“Yo!!” it started.
The texter had recently bought the phone and could see, the sender said, Alex Pikula’s “messages, emails, cards, bank, notes and personal information.”
A third message soon arrived, also apparently from the Philippines.
The phone, it said, would be “auctioned on the black market with your personal information and everything about you that you had on it.” It included detailed instructions on unlinking IDs.
“I told my mom, ‘Just ignore it,’” Pikula said.
But Judi Pikula, 65, was rattled. The Pikulas knew the texts were almost certainly coming from criminals. The Find My app showed his stolen phone in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, which victims call a common destination for stolen iPhones.
But Judi Pikula was worried: Was there any real threat? “I just didn’t know what to think,” she said.
Pikula was receiving the messages, her son said, because he had set her number to be displayed through the phone’s “lost mode” function. He had unwittingly made her the point of call for thieves.
She tried to ignore the messages until she received a video of a man, wielding a gun, with a message threatening assault, rape and that her family would be “slaughtered.”
“I was freaking out,” she said. “I didn’t think they could do anything, but it’s pretty scary.”
So although Alex Pikula doubted the credibility of the threats, he decided to give in to the demands.
“I wiped it,” he said, “and they never texted my mom again.”
Copy-and-paste threats
British police say that, because not everyone reports such threats, they have no way of knowing how many are sent. But they acknowledged that many people had received them, and six people described their experiences to The New York Times.
“Some of those messages were getting quite violent and quite nasty,” said Sgt Dan Green, of the City of London Police.
Many extortionists appear to use the same pattern.
First, they try deception, often imitating official Apple text. Then, they pretend to be a sympathetic bystander. If that fails, the threats begin.
“They ramp up the levels to try to make the extortion work,” said David S. Wall, a professor of criminology at the University of Leeds.
The tactics, experts said, play on the fears of victims who have lost one of their most expensive and sensitive possessions.
“Someone is holding all of your things that you hold dear in the palm of their hand,” said Elisabeth Carter, a British criminologist. “And they’re threatening you as well. It becomes this multifaceted psychological attack.”
Some gangs appear to use identical language, copying and pasting text, said experts and victims, who share their ordeals on internet forums.
But although the threats can be frightening, police officials and criminologists said they were almost certainly empty, made oceans away by thieves chasing quick profit.
Physical violence is “almost certainly not worth the gain of a single phone,” said Toby Davies, an expert on crime analysis at the University of Leeds.
Sending a text, on the other hand, is neither high-stakes nor difficult, and the payoff can be huge. “Even if only a small proportion of recipients comply and allow them to unlock, it would more than justify the effort,” he said. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
