A few days ago we brought you news of how a Chinese smuggler was caught at the border with 94 iPhones strapped tightly to his body. That might have given you a modicum of idea of just how coveted the iPhone is in the country it is actually made. If not, here’s another case.
Three Chinese men have been arrested for stealing 240 iPhones 6 handsets, worth almost 1.4 million yuan ($225,350) from a warehouse in Beijing. The heist by three “big rats,” as the Chinese state news agency Xinhua described them, using a phrase sometimes used to mean burglars, is one of the more creative iPhone thefts in China, which have increased as the phone has become a status symbol in the world’s largest smartphone market.
The men broke into a warehouse storing iPhones by digging a 50 cm hole (about a foot and a half) in the wall; one of the men was a driver for a logistics company that owned the warehouse. Police tracked some of the stolen phones by their serial numbers to the northeastern province of Heilongjiang where a seller confessed to authorities the identities of the three men.
According to Xinhua, the men spent most of the money “on cars, gold, and gambling.” When the men were caught in late December, only 300,000 yuan of the 1.34 million they had earned by selling the phones was left, according to police.
Another interesting tidbit: Chinese consumers have dubbed the iPhone 6 the “Kidney 6.” That’s because a teenager from Anhui province had sold one of his kidneys to an organ-trafficking gang to buy Apple products. Talk about biting the Apple.
