Intomobile reports that experts from a security firm are estimating that 67.000 phones to be stolen during the Olympics, based on 50.000 phones that, according to them, are stolen every two weeks in London without the Olympics. That number sounds incredibly high, so I did some research myself.
Just to set things into perspective, the 50.000 lost or stolen phones in London over a two week period, that's 1.3 million phones over the year. There are 8.7 Londoners living in the city, and lets add 1 million travelers and round it up, so let's say 10 million people are in London on average. That means that on average every single person in London loses a phone once in 8 years. Hm, I am skeptical.
The Metropolitan Police also has some stats. They are saying that around 10.000 phones are stolen per month. That would be 120.000 phones a year, or less than a tenth of what is claimed above. When taking this as a basis the resulting number of phones that might be stolen during the Olympics would be about 6.200. Far from the number above, but still a gigantic number.
I wonder why the over-regulating EU commission still hasn’t stepped in to finally force operators to run a common Europe-wide blacklist for lost and stolen phones. The GSMA actually says they have already such an international database (http://www.gsma.com/technicalprojects/fraud-security/imei-database/) but I guess a ban would cost providers a significant number of subscribers as well as revenue from replacement sales and so there’s probably strong lobbying against such measure. Of course thieves skilled enough could also change IMEIs but the challenge to do this may still pose an effective barrier to casul thieves.
UK experience with the EIR showed that there are too many issues. False positives due to duplicate (factory errors or rooting/cloning), customer hassle, operational cost.
And the theives can esily avoid blocking by shipping them to non-EIR countries.