According to the British newspaper The Guardian, more than 400,000 lost and stolen mobile phones have been disabled in the past five months in an effort to reduce the number of thefts. The effort is a joint action of the English police and the mobile phone industry. In 2001, more or less 710,000 mobile phones were stolen and at nearly half of the street robberies in London, mobile phones are stolen. The largest national mobile operators and the police jointly try to reduce mobile thefts by a poster campaign. A special phone number is opened for the reporting of robberies. The mobile phones care to be blocked and details are kept in a database which can be accessed by all mobile operators and the police. Telecom wolrdwire reports that O2 already has disabled 100,000 mobile phones.
