Apple stays mum as mob heists surge around state

Groups of men with hoods over their heads are making off with tens of thousands of dollars in products from Apple stores in the Bay Area, but what is unclear is why the company can’t render the devices worthless.

Can’t Apple track down the phones and laptops, or activate kill switches, or make the samples nonfunctional when off their special tables and outside the stores? The company won’t discuss the matter.

The “grab-and-run” heists hit stores in Santa Rosa, Walnut Creek, Emeryville and Corte Madera in August. Surveillance footage released by police shows thieves grabbing stacks of laptops, yanking them from their chargers as shocked employees and customers

look on.

The criminals disappear into getaway vehicles in seconds. No one has been hurt, at least so far.

Experts aren’t sure what strategies Apple may be using, if any, in a bid to prevent the thefts. But Matthew Green, an associate professor of information security at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the electronics could pose problems for people who try to use them.

Apple controls the activation process required to work the products, Green said, and could theoretically track down the gadgets.

If someone tried to put in a SIM card and connect a phone to a U.S.-based carrier such as Sprint or Verizon, those companies would know right away, said Neil Broom, the owner of Technical Resource Center, a computer forensics firm in Huntington Beach.

Broom said phones may be sold overseas, or sold for their parts, or may have value if used without cellular service — like an iPod Touch. He noted that display devices at Apple Stores are only demonstrations of what the phones can actually do.

“They’re running some loop of smaller software, like a video almost,” Broom said.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment Friday on the thefts and potential security features that could deter them.

The most recent attack happened Wednesday just after 8 p.m., when police said three men in hoodies ran off with $35,000 worth of electronics from the store in the Santa Rosa Plaza, an indoor mall near that city’s downtown.

Four thieves rushed into the Apple Store at Broadway Plaza, an outdoor mall in Walnut Creek, at 5:40 p.m. on Aug. 25, taking $30,000 worth of iPhones and laptops from displays in the store, police said. They left in a black Mercedes-Benz that had pulled up out front.

That same day, thieves hit the store in Emeryville’s outdoor Bay Street mall. And three days earlier, at Corte Madera’s outdoor Town Center, five thieves took $19,000 worth of Apple products and fled in a black Honda sedan, police said.

Surveillance images from the Central Marin Police Authority and Walnut Creek Police Department show every intruder in a black sweatshirt with the hood drawn.

While the departments have a few leads, officials said, identifying the perpetrators is a challenge.

“These are difficult due to them covering most of their face with their hooded sweatshirts and their coordinated attack on the stores with a getaway vehicle waiting out front,” said Lt. Tom Cashion of the Walnut Creek force.

The thefts in Walnut Creek and Emeryville appear to be related, Cashion said.

Though the last month has seen a surge of activity, crooks have targeted several Apple Stores in California in the past two years in grab-and-run incidents. Men in hooded sweatshirts snatched display models from stores in Corte Madera, Burlingame and San Francisco in 2016.

A rash of similar thefts in Southern California ended Aug. 21 when shoppers tackled two suspects in a Thousand Oaks store.

A pursuit by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department nabbed three others, officials said, along with electronics taken in that heist and another in Los Angeles County. Three of the suspects were from Antioch.