Chilling Snapchat ads offering children £380 to nick phones with ‘£100 bonus scheme’

Gangs are using Snapchat to offer children nearly £400 to snatch iPhones, grooming them into organised crime in the process.

Recruiters even promise a £100 ‘bonus’ if a child manages to steal more than 10 handsets, according to adverts seen by the Scotland Yard.

Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has warned that the trade has become an ‘entry point’ into organised crime.’

He said: ‘Children recruited to snatch phones for quick cash are being groomed into criminal networks, normalised into offending behaviour and pushed further into exploitation.

‘What begins as one device on a street corner becomes a pathway to debt, coercion, violence and deeper criminality.

He wants tech giants to do more to turn stolen devices into ‘unusable bricks’ to smash the gangs.

He told the International Mobile Phone Crime Conference that manufacturers have focused on data security.

He said: ‘They spend far less attention on the physical safety of their customers who walk through cities with a £1,000 or £2,000 device held loosely in their hands.’

Since 2017, 587,498 phones were taken across London – not including the City of London – only 14,000 have been recovered.

London remains an ‘outlier’ for the high volume of personal robberies and thefts compared to other police services.

The Met Police identifies a suspect in just 0.9% of cases involving theft from a person and in Westminster, nearly three quarters of personal robberies and thefts involve a mobile phone.

To tackle the problem, they are using high-powered e-bikes and drones to track snatchers on the move.

By mid-February, 248 people were arrested and 770 handsets were recovered in a single month.

Sir Mark added: ‘I do not understand why tech companies leave their clients at risk despite two or three years of discussions.

‘Until this device is worthless, the market will remain attractive to organised crime.’

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