Retail Environment
“CeX”, Thugs, and Stolen Phones
Greater “Screen Time” Means Higher Levels of “Screen Crime”.The UK’s Biggest Seller of Pre-loved Electronics is “Stealing a Lead” on Intelligence Collaboration on Stolen and Fake Phones
By John Wilson, Executive Editor
Our screen love affair with our mobile phones looks set to continue at pace this winter. In autumn, Apple, which was responding to the successful launch of new Samsung handheld products throughout 2025, successfully dropped its much-awaited iPhone 17 with its larger display and longer battery life, pushing up pre-launch sales by 2.6 per cent during the run-up to Christmas.
But with greater tech dependency and vicarious living through social media comes increased levels of opportunist and organised crime around these desirable items—whether it’s distraction theft, destructive burglary and robbery or even highway hardware heists of high-value stock in the supply chain during the peak run up to Christmas.
The current level of incidents is way beyond the opportunistic “taking of the tablets”, to a full-blown organised crime epidemic.
In September 2025, a police crackdown operation in London helped to dismantle an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China in the past year.
In what the Metropolitan police says is the UK’s largest ever operation against phone thefts, raids were carried out at twenty-eight properties in London and Hertfordshire, resulting in the arrest of eighteen suspects and the discovery and recovery of more than 2,000 stolen devices.
Police believe the gang could be responsible for exporting as much as 40 per cent of all phones stolen in London.
The investigation went back almost twelve months after a phone was stolen at Christmas 2024.
“It was actually on Christmas Eve, and a victim electronically tracked their stolen iPhone to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport”, Detective Inspector Mark Gavin said.
“The security there was eager to help out, and they found the phone was in a box, among another 894 phones”.
Det Insp Gavin said: “Finding the original shipment of phones was the starting point for an investigation that uncovered an international smuggling gang, which we believe could be responsible for exporting up to 40 per cent of all the phones stolen in London”.
The number of phones stolen in London has almost tripled in the last four years, from 28,609 in 2020, to 80,588 in 2024. Three-quarters of all the phones stolen in the UK are now taken in London.
More than twenty million people visit the capital every year and tourist hotspots such as the West End and Westminster are prolific for phone snatching and theft.
The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that theft from a person had increased in England and Wales by 15 per cent in the year ending March 2025, its highest level since 2003.
The growing demand for second-hand phones, both in the UK and abroad, is believed to be a major driver behind the rise in thefts with many victims ending up never getting their devices back.
“We’re hearing that some criminals are stopping dealing drugs and moving on to the phone business because it’s more lucrative”, Policing Minister Sarah Jones said.
“If you steal a phone and it’s worth hundreds of pounds you can understand why criminals who are one step ahead and want to exploit new crimes are turning to that world”.
Senior officers said the criminal gangs specifically target Apple products because of their profitability overseas.
The Met police investigation discovered street thieves were being paid up to £300 per handset—and the force said stolen devices are being sold in China for up to £4,000 each, given they are internet-enabled and more attractive for those trying to bypass censorship.
Commander Andrew Featherstone, the Met’s lead for tackling phone theft, said: “This is the largest crackdown on mobile phone theft and robbery in the UK in the most extraordinary set of operations the Met has ever undertaken”.
“We’ve dismantled criminal networks at every level, from street-level thieves to international organised crime groups exporting tens of thousands of stolen devices each year”.
CeX
The evidence of a rise in the theft of mobile phones chimes with data openly shared by CeX, the UK’s biggest cash buyer of second-hand electronics which began life as a single games and computer specialist shop on London’s Tottenham Court Road in 1992 and has expanded to more than 600 stores worldwide in the last thirty years.
By being part of the global circular economy, the business—which specialises
in the repair and re-sale of pre-loved product—has managed to stop over 300 million tech products going straight to landfill.
The business—which now spans across eleven countries including Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, the Canary Islands, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Australia, India, and Italy—works with police forces, other retailers, and the Telecoms United Fraud Forum (TUFF) to raise awareness of the problem of criminality in the second-hand market. This forms part of a global collaboration which helps protect its own brand integrity from critics and competitors who may have previously linked its business model to the sale of stolen items.
The fact that Christmas is looming large also exacerbates the challenges for organised crime and opportunistic chancers trying to offload or make money from stolen phones, according to Derrick Gough, head of loss prevention for CeX.
“We certainly do see a rise in theft from around the end of September through to January. I lovingly call this period the criminal shopping season,” he said.
“There’s a distinct rise in opportunist phone snatches and organised crime gangs (OCGs) preying on Christmas temps and the hustle and bustle of busy stores trying to keep queues low as possible.”
“We roll out refresher training at the start of quarter four for this exact reason using CCTV from real incidents to raise awareness for those new staff entering the business and to refresh others on the behaviours and characteristics of criminals targeting us,” he added.
The stores have become a modern-day magnet for a wide selection of society, reflecting the economic nuances of the day with the cost-of-living crisis bringing to the surface both legitimate and non-paying customers.
These include everyone—from the cost-conscious environmentalist who wants nearly-new tech that won’t literally cost the earth, to the desperate and determined.
Added to this are the opportunist insurance scammers and OCGs who are not shy about the use of force and are happy to deploy thuggish and intimidatory behaviour in their attempts to access stock.
To this point, CeX puts the safety of its staff front and centre and has target-hardened its stores with AI-driven CCTV, panic alarms, and industrial strength locks on cabinets, as well as coded door access control and DNA Smartwater in certain high-risk stores.
“Staff over stock every time when it comes to priorities for our business,” said Derrick who has worked for CeX for the last eighteen years.
“The technology should work for you rather than you working for it, which is why we have invested in AI analytics which can pick up on behaviours such as raised voice tone, for example.”
Data Dependent
The CeX model differs considerably from other retailers in that it has no traditional warehouse-to-distribution centre (DC) supply chain. This is because its product source is direct from and to the general public.
To this point, it has to rely upon its own quality control protocols in regard to the provenance of the product. This is contingent upon the receipt and sharing of due diligence data to make sure its products and customers are bona fide in terms of who they say they are and what they are buying and selling.
For obvious reasons, the products crossing the counter at CeX stores can’t be stolen or the subject of an insurance claim or where the seller is attempting to gain financial benefit from a bogus refund from the original retailer, for example.
Recipero
Supporting this endeavour, CeX has a superpower in its access to AssetWatch, a dedicated solution for monitoring, tracing, and protecting mobile phones and other portable technology at risk of fraud, theft, or unauthorised resale.
It has been developed for organisations that issue, finance, ship, or sell mobile technology, and alerts subscribers the moment a device appears in a location other than where it should be, providing the lawful owners with visibility of the asset.
Developed by Recipero, a UK-based but global device intelligence solution provider, AssetWatch provides high-volume asset registration for businesses that need to detect and prevent stock loss by halting the trade of assets that should be in possession of the business.
Honest traders such as CeX use Recipero’s StatusCheck service to carry out due diligence on prospective purchases. AssetWatch registered devices are preventing traders from buying devices stolen from other traders or consumers.
StatusCheck has tens of thousands of traders worldwide performing checks on millions of used property transactions each month, and in so doing provides a unique window into the movement of used goods and any attempts to sell stolen goods.
Put simply, subscribers add the device serial number when they acquire it and inform Recipero when they sell it. Between these two events, the property should be in stock, in transit, or some other state under the legitimate owner’s control.
“When the owner sees their property on the market between these two events, our trading community rejects any sale attempts, limiting the opportunity for profit,” said Les Gray, the co-owner of Recipero.
“This rejection happens even in the absence of police reports, insurance claims, or in the case of phones, network blocks. Until the attempted trade, the owner may not even know the item has been stolen,” he added.
CeX, a user of the Recipero eco-system for more than twenty-five years, can tell within seconds of a customer entering the store to sell a device whether it is legitimate or not. If it is not legitimate, the result is that the colleague will not accept it for re-sale, thus helping to thwart the black market in stolen devices.
“To deter acquisitive crime, we must talk about broader collaboration with your customers, suppliers, competitors, and even other industries,” said Les.
An oft-cited 19th century phrase reads, “deprive a thief of a safe and ready market for his goods, and he is undone”.
“Perhaps reducing or killing the ability to “fence” stolen items seems evident to the loss prevention professional, but it bears re-stating. “If there is no market for stolen goods, there is simply no benefit to the thief in stealing. We will likely never eliminate that market, but with co-operation, we can significantly reduce it to benefit us all,” he added.
This is very much the philosophy of CeX, which has had to protect its people, property, and profits on a number of fronts.
“The simple truth is that we only want to sell legitimate goods—we are the honest brokers and the poster boys for the second-hand market,” said Derrick Gough.
But the business can only do this through collaboration. Derrick, an evangelical user of the Recipero technology is a proactive advocate of informing law enforcement and other retailers as to where and when “bad actors” are attempting to offload their stock at CeX locations.
“Yes, we stop people selling stolen and fake phones to us, but we also work with the police and other retailers to share our data. We will share the device details and highlight the fact that they have bad actors in their business—we have done so with a number of the larger technology retailers.”
“We don’t tend to see a rise in blocked phones (insurance claims). It’s a pretty constant number throughout the year, and the collaboration work with Recipero and its network of insurance companies ensures we can identify fraudulent claims quickly enough for the insurers to reject the claim,” added Derrick.
This generosity with data sharing is not because it is Christmas but represents an all-year-round offer to collaborate in the prevention and reduction of crime and also protect the brand image of the second-hand market which has had a bad press for many years.
“We, as a business would be missing a trick if we did not share the information, because our market has been portrayed in such a bad light,” he added.
“Information sharing represents collaboration with the police or insurance companies. We are helping to distinguish between the legitimate traders and the thieves, the insurance scammers, and those selling fake devices.”
The business has also been working with Opal, the dedicated acquisitive police crime unit which, with over sixty UK law enforcement agencies, also makes use of the impressive Recipero data.
Statistics
The average number of searches performed across Recipero services last year was 5.7 million per month of which 6.43 per cent were given a red flag, meaning they were stolen or otherwise compromised.
The return on investment for the checking and “red flagging” of this 6 per cent is estimated at up to thirty times.
The total global value of items checked on Recipero StatusCheck last year was almost £14 billion, while the estimated value prevented from getting into the hands of criminals was almost £1.5 billion.
With an item reported lost or stolen every 52 seconds, mobile phones and laptops represented almost 75 per cent of the database searches last year, while the police accessed the Recipero database almost 1.5 million times in the same period.
June 2024 represented the highest number of checks last year, with almost 7.5 million devices run through the system. Fraudulent insurance claims increase after a new product release raising the rate of red flagged devices from September each year.
CeX, which has a presence in twenty countries, contributes a large amount of the checks carried out using Recipero.
“Derrick and his predecessor Sam Millen have gone above and beyond in protecting the high street,” said Les Gray.
“Their co-operation and collaboration with other retailers on the high street is phenomenal—no one else goes that far. They are an example to the industry and constantly doing the right thing, proving that snobbish opinions about the second-hand market are misplaced.”
“It is such an important sector because during tough economic times, an enormous percentage of people would not have a mobile phone if it was not for the likes of CeX.”
“The UK and businesses like CeX lead the world in due diligence in this market on an individual device and enterprise level,” added Les.
Internal Challenges
But Derrick’s focus on CeX’s risk profile does not stop at external threats. His role is also to identify and challenge internal challenges which impact store performance and shrink levels, and once again, the approach is not conventional.
The focus is not on dismissal for compliance failures but education and assistance particularly around issues such as “buying errors”. The traditional loss figure-based KPI for stores was replaced with a behavioural-based KPI, with the loss figure being the benchmark and resulting in longer term improvement on losses.
“Our job is to help and to right the wrong behaviours. They may have put the wrong code in which would ordinarily mean the loss of a bonus on the old KPI, for example,” he said.
“Our job is not to punish someone who is trying to be honest. We should recognise that honesty and offer learning and development to help them reduce any deficit figures.”
“It’s like losing weight—if you try and do it quickly, you will not sustain the weight loss. If you progress more steadily and slowly, you will not put the weight back on and develop habits and techniques which lead to a longer-lasting change. The same goes for colleagues who are working hard to change their behaviours.”
Artificial Intelligence
To this end, CeX has also invested in machine learning outside of the CCTV analytics described earlier. It now has a dedicated AI department looking at wider loss analytics such as staff behaviour dynamics.
“We find that the out-of-the-box solutions don’t tend to accommodate the nature of our business, such as buying and other challenges that come from having no central distribution centre,” said Derrick.
“We therefore have our own department dedicated to developing AI models, and my team are currently engaged with them to build a loss model based on the behaviours and patterns within the loss data so that we can use projections to identify where a store is predicted to have losses in the future.”
“Along with this, we use machine learning to analyse our current losses at a store level over the past quarter, and this generates a stock-take cycle for the stores to follow over the next period.”
Extension of the Model
Although CeX is firmly wedded to and synonymous with the second-hand electronics market, it has in recent years moved the model into the pre-loved clothing market, trading in high-quality and branded fashion products.
Now, with five stores including a designer outlet on Brompton Road in London, which was a former Armani department store, risk modelling the business also falls under Derrick’s remit. Once again, the approach is collaborative reaching out to other retailers in the space.
It’s high-end pre-loved fashion which is a very competitive market with the likes of competitors such as Vinted,” said Derrick.
Whether it’s related to the phone in your hand or the clothes on your back, CeX has a different way of working in today’s sluggish economy where customers are looking for cost-effective value and differentiation as well as wanting to do their bit for the environment.
This burgeoning and lucrative market has captured the attention and imagination of black markets and organised crime as a means of disposal and even money laundering, but the risk and loss prevention model adopted and honed has named and shamed the practices that had previously given the industry a bad name.
Through sharing its rich seams of crime data, the business has dared to be different and not “off the shelf” or “off the peg” when it comes to delivering CeX appeal.
