iPhone taken in ‘crime wave’ and more Capitol protesters arrested on Apple Crime Blotter

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series, looking into the world of Apple-related crime.

Two Massachusetts men who were arrested in December for an alleged fraud scheme involving fraudulent disaster SBA loans used to buy iPhones have now been indicted on federal charges.

According to the Justice Department note, the two 24-year-old men were indicted on one charge of conspiracy to commit electronic fraud, four charges of electronic fraud and assistance and complicity, and one charge of aggravated identity theft. The two are accused of stealing people’s identities, opening fraudulent bank accounts and using those accounts to “buy a large number of iPhones for resale”.

A woman was arrested by the Halton Regional Police Service in Oakville, Ontario, for what they described as a “crime wave”, consisting of 18 charges for nine different crimes committed between Christmas Eve and 23 January.

The Oakville News reports that the alleged crimes included the theft of an iPhone and the fraudulent use of its Apple Pay function. But the 30-year-old woman is accused of much more, including the theft of $ 66,000 in equipment from Canadian offices of Rockstar Games, based in Oakville. The woman is also accused of stealing mail and a pair of jackets, one of which contained the car keys, which the woman allegedly used to steal a car.

In addition to several charges of theft, which include theft of a motor vehicle and two charges of fraudulent use of a credit card – probably because of Apple Pay charges – the woman faces six charges of non-compliance with parole.

A 40-year-old woman who worked as a logistics manager for a telephone repair company in Singapore was arrested on charges of “embezzlement” of more than 25,000 defective iPhones and conspiracy with a man in Malaysia to sell them abroad. The woman worked for Pegatron.

According Channel News Asia, she was jailed for nine years after pleading guilty to “conspiring to commit a criminal breach of trust as an employee and using part of the proceeds of the crime to buy a condo apartment.”

We spoke last time about several individuals who are facing charges related to the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. Several of these people were filmed by other users’ iPhones or were captured by location data or by their own social media posts, often on iPhones.

In the second half of January, several other people were arrested and charged, also because their iPhones handed them over. A man was arrested after posting a screenshot of his iPhone on Facebook showing the US Senate WiFi network.

A woman was arrested after being filmed with a pink iPhone while on Capitol Hill.

The participant in the Capitol riot known as “Zip Tie Guy”, according the criminal action against him, he had shot an incriminating video throughout the day with an iPhone strapped to his chest. He captured potentially illegal actions like “hiding weapons before entering the Capitol and how he found flexible handcuffs”.

In the story of someone on Capitol Hill who would not potentially go to prison, after all, the Justice Department announced on January 29 that it had closed the investigation into suspicious stock negotiations by Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, which took place after a briefing last February about the oncoming coronavirus. The New York Times Burr reports will not face charges.

In May 2020, a warrant was issued to Apple to obtain Sen. Burr’s iCloud data as part of an investigation into Burr’s stock trading and the possibility of insider trading. The Republican senator, who also handed over his iPhone to the authorities, had made more than 30 stock sales in mid-February, the day after a briefing he received as a senator.

Burr, four years before iCloud’s mandate, had co-sponsored a bill that would force companies like Apple to provide confidential data about customers under investigation. The senator, who stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the investigation was announced, is expected to withdraw from the Senate in two years.

A criminal gang in Hong Kong recently carried out a robbery in which it lured a cryptocurrency dealer to an office and stole the equivalent of $ 448,700 in cryptocurrencies with a knife, via its iPhone. The South China Morning Post writes that this is the second recent robbery of its kind in that city.

“Shortly after she received the money, three men carrying a knife or stick ran out of a room and stole the money and her iPhone with a knife,” the police told the newspaper.

A man walked into a Cricket Wireless store in South Carolina in mid-January and ordered an iPhone charger. So the man pulled out a gun and ordered iPhones, getting three iPhone 11s, four iPhone SEs, five iPhone 12s and six iPhone XRs, The Times and Democrat reported. A similar assault took place the same day at a nearby Boost Mobile.

An Illinois woman told Chicago’s CBS Affiliated that the Chicago Police Department broke into her home in 2019, causing thousands of dollars in damage to her daughter’s television, mattress, mirror and iPad. But, the woman said the police were in the wrong house.

The operation, which was attributed to a “bad tip” from an informant, did not result in any financial compensation for the woman, who lives in the city of Calumet, near the city of Chicago. An insurance claim, she said, was denied because the damage was from a police raid.

A woman in Perth, Australia, had her iPhone stolen along with her purse and, after the police refused to investigate, she used Find My iPhone to track down the thieves, who were 10 and 12-year-old girls. According 6PR, the two children “admitted the theft in front of their mother and showed me where my phone was on the completely broken drain.”

Two young men were seized near a T-Mobile store in the Philadelphia suburb in mid-January after they were spotted by a store employee trying to steal iPhones from the window. After the suspects hinted that they had weapons, the store manager notified the local police, who arrested the two suspects and also a 17-year-old girl who was acting as an escape driver.

Crimewatch PA reports that the group traveled from Baltimore.