It started with a single stolen mobile phone, found inside a sealed parcel, inside a warehouse near Heathrow airport.

It ended in police dismantling what detectives believe to be the UK's largest phone smuggling network.

The device had been electronically tracked to the warehouse not by officers, but by a victim who had it stolen from them just before Christmas in 2024 and alerted the DHL courier company.

"The phone was ringing in the package," explains Commander Andy Featherstone, the Metropolitan police's lead on mobile phone theft.

"It was still on. Which is very unusual in these circumstances, because they tend to be wrapped up, so the signal isn't working. But in this case it was."

Stolen phones are often wrapped in aluminium foil in order to block wireless signals and prevent the devices from being tracked.

When police were called to investigate, they found more than 800 devices, packaged in batches of five, stacked into nine boxes, some wrapped in foil, others in bubble wrap.

All were stolen and they were destined to be shipped to Hong Kong.

A major inquiry known as Operation Echosteep was launched, with detectives who specialise in investigating armed robberies and drug smuggling brought in to track down suspects.

In September 2025, police stopped a car being driven through Waltham Forest and arrested Amir Muhammad Khadikhel and Ismat Miakhel.

Inside, they discovered several phones strewn around the back seat, with others on the floor wrapped in foil.

Both men were found wearing necklaces featuring pins to remove the handsets' Sim cards.

Police say about 2,000 more devices were discovered at properties linked to them.

Southwark Crown Court heard that one shop, Roshan Fruit and Nuts, on Lea Bridge Road in Leyton, east London, had been used to store the stolen phones.

Police found a trapdoor, leading to a basement where boxes labelled as containing dried goods held packages of phones wrapped up in foil, as well as £44,665 in cash.

In another property, the court heard stolen phones had been found stored inside the microwave.

Prosecutor Karen Robinson KC said the men had played a "leading role" in a "sophisticated and criminal network" that had seen more than 5,000 phones seized by police, with a value in the UK of around £5.5m.

The court heard Khadikhel had fled Afghanistan in 2019 and travelled to the UK as an asylum seeker.

A third man, Mansoor Mohammed, who came to the UK from India on a visa in 2019, was also identified as being involved in the handling of devices.

Khadikhel, 35, from Wanstead, and Miakhel, 33, from Walthamstow, along with Mohammed, 30, from Wood Green, pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to handle stolen goods and participating in criminal activities of an organised crime group.

Khadikhel and Miakhel also admitted to conspiracy to remove stolen goods.

On Friday, Judge Adam Hiddleston sentenced Khadikhel to nine-and-a-half years' imprisonment, Miakhel to nine years' imprisonment and Mohammed to six-and-a-half years' imprisonment.

The judge said the offending had been on an "enormous scale financially" and the criminality was "highly organised and sophisticated".

The prosecutor added that phone smuggling in London was "prolific" and a "very significant societal problem".

Police suspect the network was responsible for smuggling up to 40,000 phones during 2024 and 2025, exporting them to China. It is the equivalent of around 40% of all devices stolen in London at that time.

Featherstone says that wider group has "many layers in its hierarchy", with handlers recruiting street thieves via social media and advertising how much they were willing to pay them per stolen device.

"So a modern device, or the most recent phone that had been released, would fetch a higher premium - in most cases around the £500 mark," he explains.

"This network were collecting phones all across London from street thieves, and then they would take those phones in, and when they had enough they would then package them up and ship them out of the UK into China."

Saira Pike, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: "Phone theft is more than just a financial loss as it involves victims losing personal data, precious pictures or memories and their sense of security.

"Amir Khadikhel, Ismat Miakhel and Mansoor Mohammed were at the heart of a sophisticated organised crime operation that profited from the misery of victims who had their mobile phones stolen across London."

Police say children are often recruited over social media to steal phones.

Featherstone tells me one 14-year-old boy was stopped by officers with around 20 stolen phones on him, something he could potentially receive thousands of pounds for in a single day.

"Some of these devices, particularly iPhones, can fetch up to £5,000 in China and Hong Kong. The reason being that they can work on the internet without any type of restriction," Featherstone said.

"This was a global operation, millions of pounds involved, because of the value of these devices."

The Met says it has made 14 arrests connected to Operation Echosteep, seized more than £250,000 in cash and recovered more than 10,000 stolen phones, though the number of victims reunited with their devices is lower, at more than 1,000.

It has been using electric bikes, drones and live facial recognition to target street thieves.

The number of recorded mobile phone thefts and robberies fell to 62,029 in the year ending August 2026, compared to 78,344 for the same period the previous year - a drop of 20%.

In the borough of Westminster, which has the highest rate of phone theft of any London borough, 672 phone thefts and robberies were recorded last month, the equivalent of around 21 a day.

Featherstone acknowledges the numbers are still "too high", saying: "This is where we need assistance from industry, because this cannot be resolved by arrests and prosecutions and we need assistance from industry to design this problem out."

In June, the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said he had written to the Home Secretary asking for legislation to make phone companies publish data on stolen devices and whether they are reconnected, and to enforce measures to make stolen devices "unusable bricks".

The force said it had started sharing data with Apple to more closely track whether stolen handsets get reconnected to a phone network after they are taken.