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Baker’s stolen iPhone wasn’t 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.
“I stopped keeping count,” said Pastor Gideon Apé, “because of how many people there are.”
The stolen phone victims have called, emailed and sent desperate messages via Instagram, Apé said. One showed up at the church’s front door with a police officer.
The thefts that Ape has heard about have occurred up and down the East Coast — from a music festival in Philadelphia to a pub in Fort Lauderdale. Reports have also come in from Atlanta, Washington, D.C., many other cities in Florida and beyond.
The pastor is adamant that there is no iPhone theft ring being run out of his church, but he’s baffled as to what is really going on.
Douglas McKelway, a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s criminal division, said the reason criminal groups are targeting iPhones so aggressively is simple: People carry less cash these days, and it’s easier than ever to sell stolen phones on the black market.
“The phones are essentially cash for criminals,” he said.
Baker’s ordeal provides 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 to fuel a surge in robberies in the U.S. despite efforts by Apple to enhance security on the devices.
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’s where the phones stolen from many people in the U.S. ping for the final time, according to interviews with multiple victims and online posts made by others.
While it’s clear why the phones’ journeys are ending there, it remains a mystery why so many stolen devices are flowing through Miami.
The answer to another question is even more elusive: If the phones aren’t being kept at the church, where are they?
Unholy accusations
It was late August 2024 when a person first contacted the Christ Fellowship church to report that their 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.
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.
Apé said he didn’t think much of it. Church officials were busy preparing for the church’s reopening that December.
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, North Carolina, on Sept. 6, and it pinged from the church four days later.
“Looks to me you all are running an operation here while ‘under construction,’” the woman, Danielle Connochie, 29, wrote. “I will be contacting authorities.”
