Perfect storm spikes mobile phone thefts

Deep in the night of April 2, thugs armed with machetes raided the home of Yowasi Kasawuli and three others in Namugoona Zone One, Rubaga Division in Kampala City. 

The thugs were single-minded about what they wanted—electronics, especially mobile phones.
They robbed Kasawali of his mobile phones and went on to hack him to death. 

Two other residents—Geoffrey Ssematimba, 33, and Geoffrey Mwebaze, 34—also lost their mobile phones to the thugs in the vicious attack.

Kasawuli is one of the extreme cases where victims are murdered as criminals target their mobile phones. 
Despite the police having technology at their disposal, the suspects who ruthlessly hacked Kasawuli are still at large. 
Kampala Metropolitan Police deputy spokesperson Luke Owoyesigyire also revealed that the mobile phones have never been recovered.

Mobile phone theft is one of the offences spiralling out of control in the country. 

The low numbers of arrests, low levels of recovery of the stolen phones and undisturbed market for the stolen gadgets points to a thriving type of crime some youth have embraced. They have also become more vicious whilst carrying out the crimes.

READ: Where you’re likely to lose your phone in Kampala

Individual criminals who used to snatch phones from passengers and motorists on congested roads now operate out of meticulously organised gangs. 

These often mob pedestrians and also break into homes. 
Others even erect roadblocks or mount ambushes against motorists on roads at dusk.

Herculean task?
Most of the stolen phones are not recovered. It, therefore, invariably follows that a why question is posed. 
Unfortunately, the majority of the people whose phones have been stolen and wish to recover them are impeded by an unclear process. 

This process is so rigorous, expensive and largely informal.
The CID spends an annual average of only Shs45m on tracking stolen phones. 
Most of the said amount goes to obtaining call data, according to the police reports of 2017 and 2018. 

The vast bulk of stolen phones that are tracked are those where the suspects committed capital offences such as financial crimes and cybercrimes.

Between 2017 and 2018, a third of the entire budget on tracking phones was invested in incidents that involved murder. 
The police spent Shs1m on cases where phones were only stolen and no other offence was committed against the victims in the same period.

Mr Owoyesigyire said when someone loses a phone, he or she should report at the police station and then the police start investigations.

“As a policy, the victims aren’t supposed to pay any person for tracking a stolen phone. All police investigation services are free,” Mr Owoyesigyire said.

The last time the police took action to ensure criminals don’t benefit from theft of phones was in 2019 in an operation codenamed Tokoora. 
The criminals’ pursuit for phones had led to other crimes such as murder and assault.

They targeted more than 111 dealers and shop owners where they recovered 6,808 stolen mobile phones, 527 laptops, 10 Central Processing Units (CPUs), 38 computer hard drives, three modems, four computer monitors and 15 television sets.

“What is unique about the majority of phones recovered is that each phone recovered has two different serial numbers,” Grace Akullo, the former CID director, told Sunday Monitor, adding: “Information is that the inbuilt serial number is altered using a machine called Avenge.”

ALSO READ: Police bust phone theft gang, hold 12

The operation proved to be a fascinating eye-opener of the scale of the problem. 
Many of the cases of stolen phones were shelved by detectives due to shortage of funds and equipment to track the stolen gadgets. 

In fact, 99 percent of phone theft cases where criminals do not cause other serious crimes don’t go beyond recording statements. 
Victims have to turn to private trackers for help.

Do trackers work?
A renowned phone tracker at Kampala Metropolitan Police nicknamed Brown told Sunday Monitor that successfully tracking and recovering a stolen phone is not an easy job.

“You have to work with an investigating officer, who has secured a court order to obtain call data from telecom companies,” he said, adding: “Each time you do it, you have to pay the telecom company. It is only when an amateur thief stole the phone that you will find that he or she left tracks.”

Brown said “professional” phone thieves tamper with the serial numbers, which makes it doubly hard to track the stolen phones. This breed of thieves also sell their loot to people who have markets outside the country.

“Sometimes, the stolen phone is switched off for months or their serial number is erased. To establish whether the phone has been used, you have to get a court order and call data. You can do it so many times. Every time you do it, it would cost you not less than Shs100,000,” he said.

Brown said some phones are recovered when the victims have spent money that surpasses the original cost of the gadget.
Private phone trackers’ system is still rudimentary as it bases on psychology of subjects being investigated.

“If you are lucky that the tracked phone was used, you don’t call the new user of the phone. You also get his or her call data and call the people he or she contacts. Sometimes you call them and call them fake names and they deny by telling you their right names,” he said. “You must have good stories that will keep the receiver in dialogue.”

Brown’s colleague said one time they tracked a phone that had been stolen three months ago at the Northern Bypass in Kampala City. It was being used by someone in Mubende Town in Mubende District.

Busted
He said they even wired to him mobile money several times pretending to be old friends.
Unaware of their motive, they coaxed him into attending a physical meeting where he was to receive gifts. The target indeed turned up to collect the gift, only to be arrested by the police officers and the phone recovered.

They later found out that he was also a victim, having bought the stolen phone from a weekly flea market in Mubende District. Luckily, he knew the seller who was later arrested. The seller had also bought the phone from a businessman in the city centre.

“With the help of the police, we arrested five people before we got the one who stole the phone on Northern Bypass. The owner of the phone spent a lot of money on the case. He had lost his land titles, national identity card and academic documents that were in the bag during the robbery. He wanted to recover them. Some of the documents were recovered at the home of the suspect in Nansana,” he said.

Brown and his colleague said the arrested people, except the real thief, had to mobilise resources to compensate all that the victim had incurred before they were released on police bond.
Brown said many of their clients often want the phone recovered in the shortest time possible, which is hard if the thieves haven’t switched on the phone or used it.

DON'T MISS: Shs170m smartphones stolen in Kampala traffic jams

“It is a waiting game. There are times they switch on the phone and the track shows that it is in Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan where we can’t recover them yet the owner has spent more than Shs400,000 on obtaining call data from telecom companies and our facilitation,” he said.

He said when they fail to recover a stolen phone, their clients often report them to the police and demand a refund.
“The police officers, even if they know you and are aware of the process, will charge you with obtaining money by false pretence,” he said.

In 2019, after the police received many of those complaints, they banned private phone trackers.
Police officers at the stations are now hesitant to share contacts of private phone trackers with the victims for fear of being accused of connivance with trackers if the stolen items aren’t recovered.

All of this has created a perfect storm that has emboldened phone thieves to the point of being aggressive and daring in their theft attempts.

Police Records
Police official records across 2020 and 2021 show that an average of 4,000 cases of theft of mobile phones was annually registered. 

The Annual Crime and Traffic and Road Safety 2021 report, for instance, documented that phone theft cases increased by 2.4 percent to 4,143 cases from 4,043 cases in 2020. This was despite the country having a hard lockdown that spanned more than six months.

“Most of the cases are a result of snatching from unsuspecting members of the public,” Mr Tom Magambo, the director of Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID), said during the release of the crime report last month.

Police sources familiar with mobile phone theft cases told Sunday Monitor that incidents could be more than five-fold of what is recorded. 

The police’s 2021 statistics show that most of such thefts were in the Kampala Metropolitan Area, followed by the Rwizi region (Mbarara and nearby districts).

[email protected]