Sarah Carson shares her personal experience of being a repeated victim of phone theft, highlighting the emotional, financial, and societal pressures that come with such an ordeal. She examines the judgment she faces, the loneliness and anxiety that follow, and the bureaucratic nightmare of navigating the aftermath of a stolen phone.
With phone snatching on the rise, Sarah Carson, who has been a victim multiple times, shares her advice on what to do if it happens to you and how to protect your data. Eleven times, I've experienced that familiar, horrifying, urgent panic as I reach for my phone and discover it's gone.
This panic lingers for days as I replay every second, trying to understand when and why I let my guard down, how I didn't recognize I was a target, and why it wasn't obvious to me that a seemingly safe location like the children's corner of a Waterstone's bookstore on a Saturday afternoon could be the scene of a perfect crime. This week, in a major crackdown, the Metropolitan Police seized 1,000 phones, at least seven of which could be mine, considering I've had seven iPhones stolen from me in London alone over the past 10 years. My 'Find My' app serves as a grim repository of once-cherished devices, their GPS trackers showing me their rapid journey away from me, heading towards Walthamstow, Turnpike Lane, Electric Lane, and even Lloret de Mar. They take not just my data, messages, memories, photos, but also my confidence. I don't know anyone who's had more phones stolen than me. It's something I'm deeply ashamed of. Each time, after getting a new phone and stopping the frantic calls to my mother about my failure to handle the responsibility of adulthood, I think I've become more cautious, only to have it happen again. In January, it occurred twice within 10 days. I couldn't bear the thought of repeating the process of informing everyone, so I switched to communicating exclusively via email, hoping they wouldn't notice.The common refrain I hear is that it's often your own fault. You waved it around in the face of a kid on a moped wearing a balaclava, you unzipped your massive coat pocket and held it open for a woman with her hood up, you invited the man who asked for the time in Finsbury Park station to rob you because you advertised your phone's existence by, say, taking a call, using Google Maps, or using contactless payments for public transport. Like the eight million other people in London with phones. I want to scream to the smug, unscathed individuals who probably only get a new phone when their old one slows down or they are offered an upgrade, not because it was stolen when they were getting off the bus or pickpocketed going through a turnstile. “You’re right. If I didn’t use my phone, I probably wouldn’t have had it stolen.” But then what would be the point of having it in the first place? This judgment often comes from people who live outside London. My friends here are incredibly supportive and don't understand that when you live independently, and spend a lot of time traveling alone, often late at night, you are simply more likely to be targeted than someone in a small village surrounded by people they know and trust, who goes everywhere in their car.And why do I have to defend myself? “I wasn’t even drinking this time!”, “It was the middle of the day”, “I took my hand off it in my pocket for a split second to stop a copy of the Judith Kerr treasury falling on the floor” – and somehow prove that I was behaving with utmost decorum and vigilance for other people to concede that no, it shouldn’t have happened to me. Some of those thefts, when I was younger, were indeed when I was drunk, and they weren’t my fault either. If it were any other crime, you wouldn't rub in a clearly traumatic, stressful, and time-consuming experience by listing all the ways you have personally avoided it. Yet when it comes to our phones – that tool through which all our life is recorded and conducted – there seems to be a moral superiority attached to holding onto them. Believe me, when your phone gets nicked, you don't need anyone else to make you feel bad about yourself. Aside from the bureaucratic nightmare – marking it as lost on iCloud, contacting your network provider to cancel the service and blacklist the device, filing a police report to get a crime number, canceling your mobile banking apps, filing an insurance claim, and waiting, waiting, waiting for it to be settled, assuming it is settled quickly – the days following a phone theft are incredibly lonely. You berate yourself for your foolishness, you can only chat with people through your computer, you feel anxious and distressed not knowing if your iCloud backup was successful, and fret about what might be lost, and you're considerably out of pocket (my insurance excess is £350, I have an ongoing investigation pending because I had to file two claims within 10 days, and my father warns I will soon be uninsurable altogether).
Phone Theft Cybercrime Security Data Protection Privacy Concerns Emotional Impact Social Stigma London Crime
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