Thieves stole 20 phones during a single Brooklyn concert, as one expert warns it’s part of a growing trend targeting crowded music venues tied to an international black market, according to the New York Post.
Cops were called to punk band Hot Mulligan’s performance at the Brooklyn Paramount on Nov. 7 when a slew of unsuspecting concertgoers were seemingly pickpocketed– with the thieves turning off the phones so they couldn’t be tracked, officials confirmed to the paper.
Attendee James Crowley, 31, said he saw multiple people scanning the floor at the Downtown Brooklyn venue, looking for phones that they thought they might have dropped.
The incident is the latest in a growing series of mass phone thefts, with the stolen goods oftentimes winding up in China as part of a wildly-lucrative resale market, cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano told The Post.
The surge in demand for secondhand phones in China began in 2022 as the world emerged from pandemic lockdowns, Siciliano said. Now, the average iPhone is worth between $300 to $500 to thieves — and Chinese resellers can generate up to $5,000 in profit for a single phone stolen from the US.
In addition to the Brooklyn Paramount, police reports were filed over the summer for phone thefts at Under the K Bridge and Brooklyn Storehouse, police confirmed to the newspaper.
“Had my phone stolen last night [at] Under the K Bridge, both the police and the guy at Verizon said 20+ people have come in today with the same story,” one Reddit user wrote in August.
Another Reddit user described a “whole line of people at lost and found missing phones” after punk band Turnstile’s concert at the same outdoor venue in June.
Turnstile’s summer tour appears to have been rife with pickpocketing complaints, with hundreds of apparent victims leading the band to project an on-screen warning to fans in Los Angeles: “Attention secure your phone K thnx bye.”
