Thomas Baker knew something was wrong the moment he felt his back pocket. He was at a bar in Charlotte, North Carolina, watching an NFL game with some friends. Around 11:15 p.m., he realized he had been pickpocketed — his iPhone stolen right out of his jeans.
When Baker, 24, got home, he logged into his iCloud account and marked the phone as lost. To his surprise, he was able to track it on the Find My app as it moved down the East Coast — first to South Carolina, then Florida, Tennessee and ultimately all the way to China.
The phone’s 8,000-mile journey around the world wasn’t even the strangest thing about the ordeal. It was the location in downtown Miami where the stolen phone appeared to have been kept along the way.
At 1:38 a.m. on Jan. 28, 10 days after it had been taken from him in Charlotte, the device first pinged from Christ Fellowship Downtown.
“I couldn’t believe it — a church?” said Baker, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina this spring. “It’s just the most bizarre thing.”
Baker’s stolen iPhone wasn’t the only one to have pinged from that unlikely location. Since late last year, dozens of confused and angry people have contacted Christ Fellowship to report that their stolen iPhones were being held there.
“I stopped keeping count,” said Pastor Gideon Apé, “because of how many people there are.”
The stolen phone victims have called, emailed and sent desperate messages via Instagram, Apé said. One showed up at the church’s front door with a police officer.
The thefts that Apé has heard about have occurred up and down the East Coast — from a music festival in Philadelphia to a pub in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reports have also come in from Atlanta, Washington, D.C., many other cities in Florida and beyond.
Apé is adamant that no iPhone theft ring is being run out of his church, and he’s baffled about what’s really going on.
Douglas McKelway, a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s criminal division, said the reason criminal groups are targeting iPhones so aggressively is simple: People carry less cash these days, and it’s easier than ever to sell stolen phones on the black market.
“The phones are essentially cash for criminals,” he said.
Baker’s ordeal opens a window into the shadowy world of iPhone theft rings. It also illustrates how demand in China for secondhand phones and their parts is helping fuel a surge in thefts in the United States despite efforts by Apple to enhance security on the devices.
Ground zero for the black market in iPhones, experts say, is the Chinese city of Shenzhen, an electronics mecca where dealers are known to buy and sell used phones no questions asked. That’s where the phones stolen from many people in the United States ping for the final time, according to interviews with multiple victims and online posts made by others.
While it’s clear why the phones’ journeys are ending there, it remains a mystery why so many stolen devices are flowing through Miami.
The answer to another question is even more elusive: If the phones aren’t being kept at the church, where are they?
Unholy accusations
It was late August when a person first contacted Christ Fellowship to report that her stolen phone appeared to be there. The Instagram message came from a 27-year-old woman living in Kissimmee, a Florida town about 220 miles from Miami.
The timing was strange. The four-story Baptist church, built in 1926, had been under renovation since 2018 and was still closed to the public.
Apé said he didn’t think much of it. Church officials were busy preparing for the church’s reopening in December.
About two weeks later, a North Carolina woman sent a sternly worded Facebook message to Christ Fellowship. Her iPhone had been stolen at a bar in Raleigh on Sept. 6, and it pinged from the church four days later.
“Looks to me you all are running an operation here while ‘under construction,’” the woman, Danielle Connochie, 29, wrote. “I will be contacting authorities.”
Apé immediately replied to Connochie. And after they spoke on the phone later that day, she felt very differently about whether the church was involved.
“He said he really wanted to help,” she recalled in an interview. “And he sounded genuine.”
The conversation with Connochie was still just the beginning. Not long after it welcomed back members, the church got three calls in one week from people complaining that their stolen phones were being held there, Apé said.
“I thought this is something fishy,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
The calls and messages kept pouring in. By early January, upward of a dozen people had contacted the church, Apé said.
So he decided it was time to contact Miami police. On Jan. 7, an officer went to the church and wrote up a report. Apé was desperate at that point. He said he asked the officer what he should tell the victims. He was also hoping for some answers or at least plausible theories, but the detective, Apé said, was similarly perplexed.
“He said, ‘We’ll do our best,’ and that was that,” Apé said. “I never heard from them again.”
(A Miami police spokesperson said: “An extensive search was conducted of the premises for any possible phones to no avail.”)
Apé did hear from scores of additional iPhone theft victims. At least 50, he estimates, and perhaps as many as 80.
And even those figures may not tell the whole story.
Thomas Baker, for instance, doesn’t recall whether he left a message with the church. But he did file a report with Charlotte police department, which last month issued a warning about a spate of iPhone thefts in the South End district, where his device was taken.
“I don’t think this is a Charlotte issue,” Capt. Christian Wagner said in a video on social media. “I think this is a national issue, with phones being stolen and turned over very quickly for a profit. It’s lucrative, and that’s I think why we’re seeing so many cellphones taken every night.”
The warning was issued 12 days after NBC News asked the police department for comment on iPhone thefts at Charlotte bars.
McKelway, the FBI agent, helped dismantle a sprawling criminal operation that was conducting armed robberies at cellphone stores in Texas five years ago. It made sense that criminal groups would resort to a subtler method of obtaining phones to stay off law enforcement’s radar, he said.
“The brilliance of the scheme is it’s not going to come to the FBI’s attention until somebody starts to really spend some time digging into it,” McKelway said. “And no local police officer is really going to dig into a pickpocketing case. They’re overwhelmed.”
Inside Shenzhen
Huaqiangbei is a tech lover’s dream. Situated in the heart of Shenzhen, it’s a commercial district known for massive electronics bazaars where shoppers can find everything from the newest gadgets to the most obscure parts.
It’s where used devices sell for discount prices. It’s also home to scores of hardware technicians who spend their days taking apart iPhones and other devices that no longer work or have been locked down through security settings.
The tables where some of the workers operate are literally where stolen iPhones go to die.
“These repair guys are the most convenient fencers of last resort,” said Andrew “bunnie” Huang, a Singapore-based hardware engineer who is deeply familiar with the Shenzhen electronics scene.
According to Huang, the reason so many stolen iPhones end up here can be traced in part to an enhanced security feature that Apple introduced in 2012.
An upgrade to the Find My app allowed iPhone users to turn on “Lost Mode” to find their missing devices. That also locks down the phones, preventing thieves from accessing any personal information and essentially turning the devices into paperweights.
A stolen phone is much more valuable when it can be wiped clean and sold as new. Such phones can fetch more than $800 on buyback sites, NBC News found, and there is no reason to ship them overseas.
But what about the stolen phones that have essentially been rendered useless?
“The phone itself, when it is in that state, is still useful as spare parts,” Huang said. “And the biggest market for spare parts is this one market in Shenzhen.”
But those phones go for far less money. So before they are sent to China, the criminal groups involved in the thefts often make last-ditch efforts to get them turned back on.
They do that by sending iCloud messages to the owners seeking to trick them into unlocking the devices, according to people who spoke with NBC News and others who wrote about their experiences online. If that doesn’t work, the people in possession of the stolen phones sometimes send menacing messages threatening violence to the owners or their family members.
On the day Thomas Baker’s phone pinged in Miami, he received a scam message saying his phone had been located. It encouraged him to click on a link to find out its “current location.”
Baker didn’t take the bait.
About four weeks later, when his phone was already in China, he received several more messages.
“Yo!” read the opening to one he received Feb. 25 from a number linked to the Philippines.
The person reported having bought an iPhone 15 Plus with “your messages, emails, cards, banks, notes and personal information on it.”
“The phone is going to be auctioned on the black market with your personal information and everything about you that you had on it,” the text added. “I’m telling you so you can REMOVE IT from your device list and I will factory reset it.”
Two days later, on Feb. 27, Baker received a final text message with a similar request.
There’s no way to know how many hands his phone passed through after it was stolen in Charlotte. But those last messages to Baker were probably the equivalent of a Hail Mary, experts say — a desperate attempt by those in possession of his phone to see whether they could get more money for it before it was handed off to the technicians to be harvested for parts.
“These guys are really simple people,” Huang added. “They want to have a job. They want to repair phones.”
An Apple spokesperson said the company has taken multiple steps to minimize the incentives for thieves to target Apple devices and help protect users’ data in the event their devices are stolen. They include a feature announced in April designed to make it harder to reuse the parts in a stolen phone.
“We are committed to our innovation in this area, and we will continue to work tirelessly to reduce the incentives for stealing Apple devices and further deter their theft,” the spokesperson said.
Back to Miami
Downtown Fellowship Church is in a booming section of Miami. Directly next door is a 52-story luxury apartment building known as Downtown 5th.
Baker and others said their phones’ locations bounced between the church and that building. That’s not especially uncommon, experts said, because the Find My app relies on GPS. If a phone is in a lower floor of a tall building, for example, it might not connect to GPS and would then default to sending the location of the nearest Wi-Fi access point.
There’s also another possibility, experts say. Those in possession of the phones could be using jamming devices to mask where they really are. But because the phones’ locations seemed to switch back and forth between the apartment building and church, that seems unlikely, experts say.
“I gotta be honest, the whole thing is pretty nuts,” said Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University.
He suspects the phones are being held inside a tall building very close to the church.
“My best hypothesis is the phones are seeing a Wi-Fi access point that is slightly off from where they are,” Green said.
Asael Lopez, the manager of Downtown 5th, said he was aware of the issue.
“We’ve had a few calls — people inquiring about their phones,” Lopez said. “But beyond that, there’s nothing I can say.”
If the phones are being kept near the church, it would be a somewhat audacious move. Just across the street is the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Miami. And there is another notable building just next door to the prosecutors’ office: a federal jail.
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
Apé said he wishes there was more he could do to help those who reached out in search of their phones, but there has been a silver lining.
“It was an opportunity for the people that came in to see how beautiful this church is,” he said.
The last time he received a stolen phone report was in late May. He was heading into the church when he noticed a man and a woman waiting outside. They said they were from Doral, and Apé knew at that moment exactly what was coming next.
“I said, ‘Uh oh, here we go again.’”
