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This is the shocking moment an e-bike thief snatches a mobile phone out of the hand of a victim walking down Oxford Street in London.
The man was seen on video footage casually strolling down the busy street reading something on his phone as he held it in his right hand.
However the victim was unaware that a thief dressed in black was riding an e-bike on the pavement towards him from behind.
The e-bike rider then slowed down as they approached the oblivious victim and grabbed the phone before speeding off.
The helpless victim then gave chase on foot as the rider disappeared from view.
It comes as phone thefts in London have hit a record high with a shocking 37 people having their mobile stolen every day in the capital's West End alone.
New data has revealed that almost 231,000 phone thefts and robberies were recorded over the past four years in the capital, a threefold increase.
The epicentre for these brazen crimes is in the world's theatre capital, the West End, a magnet for tourists where around 40,000 phones were reported stolen over the same period, data by the Metropolitan Police shows.
Phone thefts in London have soared to record levels, with organised gangs targeting busy areas like the West End and St James’s, where luxury streets and royal residences sit side by side with swarms of unsuspecting tourists and shoppers.
One major hotspot identified is the area surrounding St James’s Park, where Piccadilly and Haymarket meet Pall Mall and Clarence House, home to exclusive members' clubs and high-profile buildings.
Scotland Yard figures show a staggering 81,256 mobile phone crimes were recorded in 2023, a 20 per cent year-on-year rise, and the highest on record.
Police believe the true number is even higher, as many incidents go unreported.
Other major hotspots include Bloomsbury, Holborn, Covent Garden, Shoreditch, Borough, London Bridge, Waterloo, South Bank, Camden Town, Regent’s Park and Stratford.
Since 2022, theft rates have risen in more than 200 suburbs across the capital — meaning over a third of London is now affected by the growing crisis.
Most thefts are carried out by gangs on electric bikes, who either snatch phones directly from people’s hands or operate in crowded areas to pickpocket victims.
Police say the surge is fuelled by international black markets, where stolen devices are either sold on or stripped for parts - an illicit industry now worth over £50 million a year.
Earlier this month, a gang responsible for exporting almost half of the mobile phones stolen on Britain's streets was dismantled in a sting operation.
Scotland Yard's commissioner hailed the series of raids as the 'biggest counter-phone theft operation in the world.'
It was thought that with the gang off the streets, the amount of phone thefts would start decreasing in London.
Roughly 300 officers smashed into 28 homes across London simultaneously in the dead of night to arrest groups of pickpockets and robbers behind an epidemic of snatch thefts.
The car driven by the pair, aged 34 and 32, was a people carrier that had been converted into a mobile 'chop shop' used to disable and transport the stolen devices.
The men had sent thousands of phones to the very same high-rise block in Hong Kong that was infiltrated by Mail reporters in an investigation in July.
The Mail tracked a phone stolen from an estate agent on London's iconic Baker Street across the globe to the office building, where it sat alongside hundreds of thousands of other handsets.
Scotland Yard's enormous policing operation came about because of a chance discovery made on Christmas Eve at Heathrow Airport.
A woman had tracked her stolen phone to a nearby warehouse and spoke with a security guard who happened to be a former Metropolitan Police officer, according to detective inspector Mark Gavin, who would later lead the operation, codenamed Echosteep.
'Together, they found her phone in a box with 894 other stolen devices,' he added.
This discovery allowed the Met to identify suspects and, for the first time, piece together vital intelligence about a sophisticated supply chain involving gangsters from around the world.
Detectives established that there were three levels of criminal involved in the operation.
On the streets are the thieves, who can make between £300 and £500 for every phone they steal from an unsuspecting member of the public.
'Sometimes we see these almost Fagin-like characters who bring in a load of phones at a time from various street-level thieves,' Mr Gavin said.
The next level up are the individuals who run shop premises where the stolen phones are collected.
Then, at the head of the operation are the criminals who export the devices in bulk to their contacts overseas, with just under a third sent to Algeria, 20 per cent to mainland China and seven per cent to Hong Kong.
Seagull and Heron are thought to be at this top level, Mr Gavin said.
A stolen phone can be blocked by network providers in the UK but can still function on foreign networks.
Demand is high in China because Chinese-made phones are often designed to block internet usage, whereas European models allow free use of the web.