Bill aims to curb smartphone theft

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Amid a spike in smartphone  thefts around Riverdale, Rep. Elliot Engel has introduced a bill that aims to discourage thieves by making it more difficult to doctor the serial numbers of stolen devices. 

Most of the previous legislation focused on creating a “kill switch,” which would render a stolen phone useless, but phone thieves could change the serial number to circumvent the kill switch, Mr. Engel said. To fix that problem, he introduced an addition to the Smartphone Theft Prevention Act just before Congress broke for recess last week.

“What we want to do is tighten every loophole, to try and say stealing a phone is useless because you won’t be able to use it,” Mr. Engel said. “We want to make it so that if you change the serial number the phone will still be useless.” 

Mr. Engel, who co-sponsored the original Smartphone Theft Prevention Act during the 2012-2013 legislative session, likened the effort to the measures that helped curb car-radio thefts decades ago, when new legislation made radios car-specific in order to make stealing them pointless. 

“They were able to get into the brains of the car radio, and they could only work in a specific car, and so no one ever hears today about car radios being stolen,” he said. “That’s what we want to do, in a similar way, for cell phones that are stolen.”

Mr. Engel said the bill is in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and he hopes to bring it to the House floor for a vote when Congress returns to session in seven weeks.

The congressman has been leading the efforts to crack down on smartphone theft since the 2012 murder of Hwang Yang, a 26-year-old chef who was fatally shot in Riverdale by a robber targeting his phone. The attacker was convicted and sentenced early this year to 35 years to life in prison. 

This year, 20 of the 69 robberies in the 50th Precinct were classified as “personal electronics” thefts, according to CompStat 2.0, the NYPD’s crime statistics software.  While is not clear how many of the stolen devices were smartphones, proponents of the new bill insist it would considerably diminish those numbers.

Another inspiration for the bill comes from Mr. Engel’s personal experience with phone theft at a Washington, D.C., gas station several years ago.

“I went to pay money to get $30 worth of gas and I went in with cash and when I came back to pump the gas … my cell phone was gone,” he said. “You just feel totally violated that someone would go into your car and steal your phone.” 

Mr. Engel said there is some pushback from cell-phone companies, which argue they should not be required by law to implement serial code security.

“If it’s, let’s say, an AT&T phone and someone doctors [the serial number], and brings it over to a Verizon store with a change in the serial number, that again would make the stolen [phone] worth stealing,” he said. “They always feel that should do this voluntarily but for the most part … they don’t obey the law without it being passed.”

Elliot Engel, Smartphone Theft Prevention Act, 114th Congress of the United States, Anthony Capote