Vodafone to tackle mobile phone thieves

Phone giant Vodafone has finally buckled to consumer and government pressure to take action against muggers who target mobiles.

Britain's biggest service provider has faced huge criticism for refusing to invest in technology which can make a stolen handset less attractive to thieves.

But the Evening Standard has learned that the company - which has 13.2million UK customers - has belatedly admitted it must do more to fight the mobile phone robbery epidemic.

Police figures show street robbers are snatching mobile phones at a rate of almost 3,000 per month in London, while a Home Office study estimated that 710,000 handsets were stolen last year in England and Wales - more than half from school pupils.

Last month, the Government accused Vodafone and BT Cellnet of failing to take responsibility for combating a crime that makes millions of their customers targets for attack.

Sources close to Home Secretary David Blunkett said he was "very frustrated" and felt the mobile phone industry had not done enough 12 months after the Home Office, police and phone providers came together to form an anti-crime task force.

Now Vodafone is to pay for the technology which would allow it to disable a handset as soon as it is stolen, rendering it useless to a thief.

Each mobile phone has a unique identifying number. If the handset is stolen, owners should be able to call their service provider, quoting this IMEI number, to stop the phone being used. Orange, One2One and Virgin all offer a service where they can immobilise stolen phones, but BT Cellnet and Vodafone, the two oldest operators, do not.

Three-quarters of the UK population have mobile phones, so it is no surprise that the opportunity for crime has shadowed the surge in ownership. But the Home Office believes that the industry should follow the example of the motor industry which responded to the Eighties explosion in car crime by making vehicles and car stereos harder to steal.

Vodafone initially rejected the Government's accusation last month that it was unwilling to invest in crime-prevention, claiming the technology was not fail-safe.A spokeswoman said: "IMEI was like a fingerprint to the handset, but not any more because cheap software downloads can give the phone a new identity."

But Vodafone has now agreed to fall into line and Whitehall sources predict BT Cellnet will have to follow suit.

The move will not make phones completely crime-proof, but Scotland Yard and the Government believe the measure will deter criminals, who have also been left in no doubt that the courts are ready to hand down longer jail terms for mobile phone muggers. Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has ruled that all mobile phone thieves must go to prison and violent robbers can expect a minimum of five years.

A Whitehall source confirmed: " Vodafone are now saying they are going to introduce handset barring. This is a valuable crime-prevention measure. No one is pretending there aren't ways around it, but a thief would have to know where to get the computer software and be willing to pay for it."

Beating the robbers