The victim of a phone snatcher who chased down her thief through the crowded streets of London has described how she ended up screaming in his face as he was arrested by police.
Ariana Roy, an 18-year-old international student from Washington in the US, went viral on TikTok after posting a video about her experience relaying how she chased the man “for 1 mile in my Prada boots” to catch him.
Khalid Aleyousfi, 26, was subsequently found guilty of theft and jailed for 11 weeks.
Roy told Yahoo News she had been with friends outside a bar on Great Windmill Street in central London at around 10.30pm on 27 September when a man started getting gradually closer to her.
As he discreetly took her phone, Roy said she was left frozen in shock, initially only whispering her suspicion as to what had happened to a friend. Another friend responded in shock, which immediately prompted the thief to start running away.
Roy said that, after hesitating for a moment, she ran after him, shouting for people to stop him.
She told Yahoo News: “I wasn’t scared at all. I just had a lot of adrenaline in me – I was kind of in disbelief.
“My first thought was f*** that guy. He stole my f****** phone. I’m not going to let him get away with this. We were running through Soho. It was pretty crowded.”
In a stoke of luck, Roy then happened to come across a group of police officers.
“We catch up to him and hold his jacket, and then that’s when the police happened to be there. So they stopped him – I think they slammed him against the store window or something, and we caught him.”
“I was really upset. I was really passionate and I was all up in his face screaming at him.
“I was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ Why do you think I would just let you take my f******* phone’. And then the police told me to back away and said I couldn’t scream at him anymore.”
Roy, had only been in the UK for two weeks when the incident happened, moved to London from Washington for a degree in finance at Regents University.
She said her mum had sent her viral videos of phone snatchings in London, urging her to be careful, but that she had expected any phone thief to be on a bike.
Aleyousfi appeared at Westminster Magistrate Court on 30 September and pleaded guilty to theft.
What happens to stolen phones?
Mobile phone thefts have been on the rise, with government figures published in September revealing a 150 per cent increase in ‘snatch thefts’ in the last year, with an estimated 78,000 people having phones or bags grabbed from them on the streets.
Police say it is being driven by increased demand for second-hand smartphones, both in the UK and overseas. According to statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) crime survey, 36% of ‘snatch theft’ offences involve the theft of a mobile phone.
According to an investigation by the Sunday Times, demand for second-hand iPhones in China is thought to be fuelling the massive volume of phones being stolen from people in the street.
The paper found that mobile phones were being moved around addresses in London until they were shipped abroad to China, Dubai, or the Philippines. The phones are allegedly unlocked and resold as second-hand or sold as parts.
The phones are then unlocked and resold or dismantled, where the parts of it are sold on to markets or recycling plants, the paper claims.
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