Major iPhone theft in the USA: bribery at mobile phone provider
In the USA, a gang of Apple cell phone thieves was busted who are said to have stolen thousands of devices directly from the customer's door –.
Lone iPhone on a step (symbolic image).
(Image: Generiert mit Midjourney durch Mac & i)
iPhone ordered, but it never arrives: In the United States of America, thousands of customers are said to have recently fallen victim to a theft ring. The group, whose members made a total of 13 arrests in February, was technically well-equipped: It checked the website of the shipping company FedEx with its own scraper and bribed employees of the major US mobile phone provider AT&T to obtain delivery data. The theft itself then took place on site at –, particularly from hallways where suppliers had left the parcels.
Left in the hallway and at the front door – stolen immediately
As the Wall Street Journal reports, a small store in New York City took the phones in order to sell them on. The business is said to have been international. In addition to local police authorities, the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and even the public prosecutor's office of the Dominican Republic were involved in the investigation. According to FedEx, the delivery company worked "proactively" with the authorities to deal with so-called "porch piracy".
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In the USA, it often happens that parcels are simply left by delivery companies outside the door of a house or apartment –, whether in the hallway or outside. This makes delivery easier when a customer is not at home, but generates a lot of theft. If a criminal also knows that a parcel is valuable, it can be deliberately stolen. This seems to have been the case with the gang that has now been busted.
Employees recruited to obtain hot data
This often happened within minutes of delivery, which suggests that the thieves had knowledge of the delivery data, which – is freely accessible on the web if you have the shipment number –. AT&T employees then apparently provided both the addresses and the shipment numbers; if this was not possible, they were scraped using their own software. This was written in such a way that it avoided restrictions (rate limiting). The program is also said to have been offered to other criminals via Telegram.
According to the report, one of the bribed AT&T store employees is said to have monitored "hundreds of deliveries" with his access data and forwarded them to the gang. Almost all of the devices were later stolen. There is even said to have been a kind of bounty to recruit other employees of the mobile phone provider. In addition to iPhones, Samsung devices and accessories such as AirTags and Apple Watch computer watches were also stolen. The "runners" deployed are said to have traveled all over the USA to carry out the thefts. Particularly brazen: they themselves used FedEx to send the stolen goods back to the fence. It is still unclear what penalties the arrested men will face.
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