Mobile phone companies are being urged to do more to help combat an epidemic of smartphone related crime.

In London alone, 80,000 smartphones were stolen last year.

Organised crime groups are also now also stealing the devices in bulk, carrying out violent robberies at phone shops.

Scotland Yard commanders want phone manufacturers to routinely cut-off access to cloud services for stolen handsets, effectively disabling their ability to function as a smartphone.

GB News was given rare access to the Met's Flying Squad, as officers smashed one gang believed responsible for stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of smartphones in robberies across the country.

The early morning raids targeted members of the gang at a dozen locations in south east London.

GB News accompanied one team from Scotland Yard's elite robbery and kidnap unit as they entered an address linked to two of the gang.

A small package, suspected to be crack cocaine, was tossed from a bedroom window as officers made their way into the flat just before 6am.

GB News was given rare access to the Met's Flying Squad, joining early morning raids targeted members of the gang at a dozen locations in south east London

Both suspects were found inside a bedroom and arrested, as other officers searched the property.

Flying Squad Detective Chief Inspector, Laura Hillier said the gang was suspected of committing mobile phone shop robberies, not just in London but across the UK.

She said organised crime groups would sometimes carry weapons during their raids, and would always use the threat of violence and intimidation towards shop staff.

The theft of smartphones in bulk was highly profitable for those gangs she said.

"One iPhone can cost in the region of £1,200. In some robberies, they've stolen more than 70 handsets at a time. So, it's really, really lucrative."

"It's high profit for them, and that's why the Flying Squad are involved in this investigation.

"We can work across borders, not just in London but nationally. We've got other forces coming to us with these crime types, and we're adding them to our investigation as we move to this arrest phase."

Mobile phone related crime has rocketed in recent years, with London a particular hotspot.

Commander Conway called on the mobile phone providers to do more to help in the efforts to combat phone related crime

In mainland Europe, Madrid, Paris and Barcelona have also seen significant increases in phone thefts.

In 2023, the Metropolitan police recorded 64,000 stolen smartphones. By last year, the number of stolen smartphones hit 80,000.

The Met said stolen handsets change hands between criminal gangs on the street for up £400 for each handset.

The crime wave around smartphones is also fuelling the increase in violent crime.

Around half of all robberies, and two thirds of thefts in London relate to mobile phones.

And up to 70 per cent of all reported knife crime in the Capital is linked to street robberies.

Commander James Conway, the Metropolitan police lead on tackling phone crime told GB News: "It's a big problem around the world because it's a valuable commodity. But in London in particular, it's been a big challenge for us over the last couple of years.

"It's right to characterise it as a commodity, because I think these days a stolen mobile phone should be seen in very much the same way that a firearm or controlled drugs or even humans who are trafficked are.

"This is organised criminal networks acquiring the phones at scale in places like London, packaging them up, exporting and selling into foreign markets again at large volumes, driven by a criminal economy and a demand in a developing world."

Commander Conway called on the mobile phone providers to do more to help in the efforts to combat phone related crime.

"The vast majority of phones stolen in London are exported to foreign markets. About three quarters of those phones that leave the UK connect to networks and cloud services overseas. So essentially they're being reused as a second hand phone in a foreign market.

"We think that phone companies could work more closely together to block access to cloud services for those devices. So that phone is still a phone in that foreign country, but it can't connect to cloud services and therefore can't operate as a smartphone, so essentially becomes a dumb phone.

"We'd also like phone companies to activate an ability to display the IMEI number. That's the specific identification number for that handset, so that if we find large batches of phones, which we do when we target a handler or catch them as they're exporting out of the UK, then we can swiftly identify who the original phone relates to.

In this latest Flying Squad operation, 10 suspected member of a phone robbery gang were arrested.

The raids form part of an intensified drive by the Metropolitan police to go after phone thieves.

Already, the increase in police activity has seen a 15% drop in mobile phone related crime in the Capital so far this year.