Can Trustonic ‘kill switch’ solve street crime?

Cybersecurity

If you thought modern technology had made smartphone theft a thing of the past, think again.

George Amponsah’s debut film last year Gassed opened with a gang of thieves on mopeds brazenly looting the phones of unsuspecting Londoners before delivering their loot to an Albanian crime gang. It doesn’t seem to stray far from reality.

“There is a well-established international black market smuggling network, with phones often leaving the country in large quantities to criminal gangs who reflash and resell them,” confirms Dion Price, CEO of Trustonic, to BusinessCloud.

“This makes moving stolen phones incredibly easy and due to the international nature of most phone thefts, evidence of the crime moves out of the country quickly.”

Biometric authentication plus tools like ‘find my iPhone’ and ‘find my Android’ don’t deter, says Price: in fact, they can have the opposite effect.

“Victims of crime can theoretically lock a device if it is stolen; however, these have had unfortunate reverse effects. The skills and tools needed to hack phones, while requiring casual theft, require investments that have led to an industrialized black market.

“Criminal gangs have the resources to employ technical experts to find new ways to compromise phones.”

Underreported

An analysis by the Home Office based on data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that in the year leading up to March 2024, 78,000 people – more than 200 per day – had their phones or bags stolen.

“Unfortunately, the numbers are probably too low,” Price said. “The actual number of phone thefts is widely considered underreported… thefts that occur without a physical confrontation (and) thefts of mid- to lower-end phones, such as prepaid devices, often go unreported at all.”

With the average selling price of phones continuing to rise year on year – the most popular device in Britain is the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which starts at £1,200, while some high-end Android devices top £2,000 – and low prosecution rates, the problem may become worse.

“Several police forces in England and Wales will not trace a mobile phone even if they are given the location of the stolen item through built-in tracking services,” says Price.

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Kill switch

Founded in Cambridge in 2012, Trustonic was originally formed from a joint venture between ARM, Thales and G&D. Its technology uses a client that connects to the basic levels of the phone’s operating system so that even if the phone is reset to factory settings, the lock remains intact. It also prevents the phone from being flashed again.

“It’s a more reliable kill switch that is exceptionally difficult to bypass,” Price explains. “Without the ability to unlock, reset or reflash the phone, you remove its value as an item for sale or as a data mine. Without that value, criminals move on, the phone business stops and the incentive to steal them stops.”

One of the key benefits of device lockout solutions is that the user doesn’t have to do anything: once the product is turned on and connected to the internet, it is protected.

Trustronic, now an EMK portfolio company, has offices across seven international locations. Today it counts the world’s largest automakers, financial institutions and mobile operators as customers, as well as every tier 1 manufacturer of Android handsets.

“Our locking technology is used in more than 150 million smartphones, in more than 30 countries around the world, so the problem is not unsolvable,” says Price. “But despite this being an increasing problem since the invention of the smartphone, the industry is slow to move and may even be lagging behind. A cynical view might argue that the slowness is, at best, due to a lack of focus on the subject and, at worst, deliberate in places.

“Device locking is the most important intervention in stopping street crime. A securely locked phone cannot be unlocked by the criminal element and therefore the phone has no resale value, deterring theft in the long term.”

Trustonic’s technology also addresses the serious problem of supply chain theft – theft in transit, theft from stores and reverse logistics – which Price describes as another “serious, global problem.”