Ruminations on crime, cell phones and values

Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies

Our household has been completely sucked in by Apple and it’s not a cheap option. The latest iPhone 14 entry level price is currently R20 000 ($1100) in South Africa. If you want an iPhone Pro Max with a terabyte of storage you are looking at double that. We have four iPhones and my 3-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 11 is the oldest phone in our family. It is a replacement for an iPhone 6P which was stolen from our house in Johannesburg. Part of the reason we chose Apple phones is how long they last. But in South Africa you are lucky if you get to keep your iPhone until it is worn out. Given the cost of iPhones they are a very attractive target in crime ridden Johannesburg. Three out of the four iPhones we now own are replacements for stolen phones. Two of our newer phones were replaced after they were stolen recently. One by a thief who came into our house in Southbroom and stole Nerine’s phone and another was snatched from Connor in Oxford Road in Johannesburg after he came out of a bar in Illovo. Phones are now such an indispensable part of all our lives that we all replaced our phones the very next day.

All of this has given me some insight into what happens to stolen iPhones in South Africa. All of our stolen iPhones were immediately reported as stolen, and iCloud locked, and we could track the location of the phone. In all three cases the phone was initially turned off only to surface later in Hillbrow Johannesburg. Hillbrow is a hub for stolen cell phones from all over South Africa. We received a flood of phishing SMS messages trying to trick us into providing the iCloud username and password so that the phone could be unlocked. No luck for the thieves there.

To quote from the Wikipedia page on Hillbrow, “Hillbrow is an inner city residential neighbourhood of Johannesburg. It is known for its high levels of population density, unemployment, poverty, prostitution, and crime”. There was an exodus of middle class residents in the 1980’s and the decay of major buildings, leaving in its wake an urban slum by the 1990’s. If we fast forward to 2023 the decay has intensified, and many residents live in abject poverty.

Hillbrow is about 3km away from where we live in the leafy suburb of Saxonwold, but it is another world and not somewhere I visit.

The phones are only briefly turned on so that they can’t be tracked. Given the sheer volume of stolen cell phones in Hillbrow, the overwhelmed South African police don’t venture into Hillbrow for a stolen cell phone. Every couple of weeks the phone is turned on briefly and is still in the same place in Hillbrow. Then another flood of phishing SMS’s. Then silence for a couple of months and then the phone is turned on once in India. Then silence and the phone is gone for good. It appears that South African criminals are not able to get around the iCloud lock but perhaps India is another matter. I don’t know how much the thieves get for the stolen iPhone, but I suspect it is a small fraction of its cost.

This then brings me to a conversation I had at a corporate breakfast meeting a few months ago. I was sitting with a group from a major global multinational corporation, and we started talking about cell phones. A young graduate professional proudly showed me her two cell phones which were expensive new state of the art phones.  I commented that they must have cost quite a bit.

She then proceeded to tell the whole group including her manager that she has monthly contracts with the cell phone provider which allows her to pay off the phone over two years. However, when the new model came out, she didn’t want to wait until the contracts expired so she took her old phones to Hillbrow and sold them to the dodgy dealers and then reported the phones as stolen. Then she reported the stolen phones to the insurance company, and they provided her with the latest new models. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Nobody would expect a thing, after all cell phone theft is as common as muck.

Is it surprising that a young South African graduate professional would do this? Given where South African values are now perhaps not. I am jaded when it comes to criminal behaviour in Johannesburg. But where even I was shocked is that this young woman brazenly has this conversation in front of me as a stranger and her manager at work. The manager said nothing and unless he is an extremely good poker player appeared unperturbed. As hard as it is for me to wrap my mind around this it appears that this young woman sees nothing untoward about boasting about committing a crime to a stranger and her manager. Will he trust her with money? Did he think about what his young employee willingly revealed in a public forum? I don’t know.

I did ask her if she wasn’t concerned about being caught. She brushed this off saying no one would suspect that she would go into Hillbrow and sell her own phones. She is right. The probability that she will be caught and prosecuted is exceedingly low. This crime pays. I politely said my goodbyes and started ruminating.

What does the future hold for this young lady? Could it be jail or perhaps there is a glittering career for someone industrious, driven, creative and lacking scruples. There are plenty of people in South Africa with no scruples at every level of society.

Thank you for all the ideas and comments. I really appreciate them and please keep them coming.

Regards

Bruce