Elite police to target phone thefts

An elite police squad is to be set up to gather intelligence on the crime bosses behind mobile phone thefts.

Scotland Yard detectives and Home Office experts aim to find the criminals in charge of the electronic reprogramming of tens of thousands of phones stolen each year.

Crime gangs have been "cloning" phone numbers on a massive scale using the internet. They have developed software that allows them to copy a number up to 30,000 times and use it on stolen handsets, defrauding mobile phone firms.

Police and the Home Office believe street crime is being fuelled by demand for handsets from the gangs, who keep their distance from the robbers using a series of middle-men, and seldom operate in the areas where phones are stolen.

The unit was set up after a summit between mobile phone chiefs and Police Minister Hazel Blears.

Each of the big four mobile phone firms already has a system to alert them when cloned numbers are used on their network. They will now tell other networks when the numbers have been used.