{"id":84498,"date":"2025-07-23T00:05:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T00:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/84498\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T00:05:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T00:05:11","slug":"a-bar-a-church-china-a-stolen-iphones-baffling-journey-around-the-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/84498\/","title":{"rendered":"A bar? A church? China? A stolen iPhone\u2019s baffling journey around the globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Baker\u2019s stolen iPhone wasn\u2019t the only one to have pinged from that unlikely location. Since late last year, dozens of confused and angry people have contacted Christ Fellowship to report that their stolen iPhones were being held there. <\/p>\n

\u201cI stopped keeping count,\u201d said Pastor Gideon Ap\u00e9, \u201cbecause of how many people there are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stolen phone victims have called, emailed and sent desperate messages via Instagram, Ap\u00e9 said. One showed up at the church\u2019s front door with a police officer. <\/p>\n

The thefts that Ap\u00e9 has heard about have occurred up and down the East Coast \u2014 from a music festival in Philadelphia<\/a> to a pub in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Reports have also come in from Atlanta, Washington, D.C., many other cities in Florida and beyond. <\/p>\n

Ap\u00e9 is adamant that no iPhone theft ring is being run out of his church, and he\u2019s baffled about what\u2019s really going on. <\/p>\n

\"ThomasThomas Baker.Courtesy Thomas Baker<\/p>\n

Douglas McKelway, a supervisory special agent with the FBI\u2019s criminal division, said the reason criminal groups are targeting iPhones so aggressively is simple: People carry less cash these days, and it\u2019s easier than ever to sell stolen phones on the black market. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe phones are essentially cash for criminals,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Baker\u2019s ordeal opens a window into the shadowy world of iPhone theft rings. It also illustrates how demand in China for secondhand phones and their parts is helping fuel a surge in robberies in the United States despite efforts by Apple to enhance security on the devices.<\/p>\n

Ground zero for the black market in iPhones, experts say, is the Chinese city of Shenzhen, an electronics mecca where dealers are known to buy and sell used phones no questions asked. That\u2019s where the phones stolen from many people in the United States ping for the final time, according to interviews with multiple victims and online posts made by others.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s clear why the phones\u2019 journeys are ending there, it remains a mystery why so many stolen devices are flowing through Miami. <\/p>\n

The answer to another question is even more elusive: If the phones aren\u2019t being kept at the church, where are they?<\/p>\n

Unholy accusations<\/p>\n

It was late August when a person first contacted Christ Fellowship to report that her stolen phone appeared to be there. The Instagram message came from a 27-year-old woman living in Kissimmee, a Florida town about 220 miles from Miami. <\/p>\n

The timing was strange. The four-story Baptist church, built in 1926, had been under renovation since 2018 and was still closed to the public.<\/p>\n

Ap\u00e9 said he didn\u2019t think much of it. Church officials were busy preparing for the church\u2019s reopening in December. <\/p>\n

About two weeks later, a North Carolina woman sent a sternly worded Facebook message to Christ Fellowship. Her iPhone had been stolen at a bar in Raleigh on Sept. 6, and it pinged from the church four days later. <\/p>\n

\u201cLooks to me you all are running an operation here while \u2018under construction,\u2019\u201d the woman, Danielle Connochie, 29, wrote. \u201cI will be contacting authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Baker\u2019s stolen iPhone wasn\u2019t the only one to have pinged from that unlikely location. Since late last year,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":84499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[611,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-84498","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114899630535853118","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}