£4.2m phone raid 'was inside job'

The phones have been deactivated

One of the UK's biggest mobile phone robberies may have been carried out using inside information, police have revealed.

A gang of thieves stole 26,000 Samsung phones, worth £4.2m, after breaking into a warehouse where the alarm system was turned off.

On Tuesday police said there were no signs the thieves had forced their way in to the building in Middlesex.

Detectives also said there were an "unusually high number" of phones being stored at the Frans Maas depot in Hayes, suggesting the thieves were tipped off.

The public will be ripped off as the phones are dead and they would have to find another criminal (to re-programme them)

Detective Inspector Morgan O'Grady

Samsung has offered a reward of up to £200,000 for information that leads to a conviction following the raid.

"They knew what they were doing and they were waiting for the right moment," a police source said.

"We are exploring the possibility that they had inside information, and could have had a ready market for the phones."

It is believed the raid was "well-planned" and the thieves would have required a 40 foot articulated lorry to transport the phones, which only arrived in the UK last week and were stacked on more than 60 pallets.

Phones 'worthless'

The phones were taken from the freight-forwarding warehouse, on Sunday, but the theft was only discovered on Monday.

The discovery came just hours before Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens launched a crackdown on mobile phone theft.

A backlog of phones built up after a cancelled order

The stolen phones have no SIM cards inside them and have been deactivated using international serial numbers programmed into each handset, making them worthless.

However, they could be reprogrammed illegally and sold on the black market, said detectives.

The warehouse in Swallowfield Road, Hayes, is just three miles from Heathrow, where robbers yesterday stole £4.6m from an airport security van.

Black market

Police said they were not linking the two raids as they believed they would have needed separate, complex planning.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said police were keeping an open mind about whether the thieves would have planned to ship the phones abroad or sell them in the UK.

Detective Inspector Morgan O'Grady, who is leading the inquiry, appealed to consumers not to buy mobiles offered to them on the black market.

He said Samsung had deactivated the phones, making them "worthless" unless they are illegally reprogrammed.

Instantly identifiable

"I would ask members of the public not to waste their money," he added.

"They will be ripped off as the phones are dead and they would have to find another criminal to do the reprogramming for them."

Samsung said it was working closely with the police. The phones are marked with logos for the Orange or One2One networks.

Mobile phone thefts in Britain have soared in recent years with more than 700,000 handsets stolen in street robberies last year.

Under the Metropolitan Police scheme launched on Monday, thousands of mobile phones are to be marked with ultraviolet pens.

The campaign aims to trap thieves by making the phones instantly identifiable if they are stolen and later recovered.