A teenage girl has pleaded guilty to carrying out a crime spree in which she snatched five phones off victims in just 24 hours across east London.
The girl, then aged 13, managed to steal five different phones which amounted to £3,000 and attempted to steal from three more people.
Her crime spree took place between May 25 and May 26 last year in Hackney. An iPhone 11 to the value of £1000 was among the stolen phones.
The child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also stole a debit card and used it to buy food for herself.
In September she pleaded guilty to five counts of robbery, three counts of attempted robbery and one count of fraud and appeared at Bromley Magistrates' Court on November 1.
The girl was sentenced to a 12-month conditional discharge, meaning no further action will be taken but she will have a criminal record.
It comes as the Standard revealed phone snatching in London's Square Mile has halved during a "relentless" police crackdown on knife-wielding moped robbers targeting City workers and tourists.
Since June, there have been 263 offences in the Square Mile compared to 516 for the same four-month period last year.
City of London and Metropolitan Police detectives launched the initiative ahead of a feared rise in muggings by thieves on bikes and scooters over the summer months.
Uniformed and plain-clothes officers were deployed in hot spots as offenders preyed on restaurant-goers and commuters.
City of London Police is reminding visitors ahead of the Christmas period to stay alert to protect themselves from phone theft.
In August London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley called on the mobile phone industry to help them reduce phone thefts in the capital as startling statistics show the scale of the issue.
Thirty-eight per cent of all personal robberies last year – equating to more than 9,500 offences - involved a phone being stolen.
Nearly 70 per cent of all thefts in London last year related to mobile phones.
According to statistics provided to the BBC by the Met, 90,864 phones - equating to almost 250 a day, or one every six minutes - were stolen across the capital in 2022.
Mr Khan told the Standard: "[This is] the commissioner and I saying to mobile phone companies - those are the manufacturers and the networks - ‘Can we work together, using your tech savvy, your innovation, to make a stolen phone almost worthless for somebody trying to steal it?’
"Because what we do know is - they [criminals] steal the mobile phone, they repurpose it, and then they sell it on.
"We’ve seen through recent history how working with car manufacturers, we made a car stereo almost worthless, because we ‘designed it out’, by making sure car manufacturers had [the stereo] in the dashboard… so [it] couldn’t be stolen."
