Toby Atkinson* was on his way home from after work drinks in Shoreditch when his unlocked phone was swiped clean out of his hands. This alone doesn’t make the 30-year-old special; Britain is in the midst of a phone-snatching epidemic, which sees more than 225 devices stolen on average each day. But, by the end of the evening, Atkinson’s swift mugging would cost him a stomach-churning £750,000.
While a new iPhone these days will set you back between £450 and £1500, thieves are in it for much more than the profits from the resale of a stolen device. In a wave of “cryptomuggings”, robbers are targeting those who’ve invested in digital currency, like Bitcoin, to loot their phones for hundreds of thousands.
Atkinson, who started investing in crypto after his mum gave him £100 pocket money for his 16th birthday, had managed to turn that gift into “well over a million”. Unfortunately, he knew his life savings – sitting unprotected in an app on his phone – were on the line the minute his device was taken.
“I chased him down an alleyway,” Atkinson says, explaining how he pressed the man up against a wall and demanded his phone back until he realised two other gang members had followed him into the alley. “One had a machete the size of my arm, and the other had a knife… I probably stood there for 40 minutes while they went through every single app that contained money or an investment and made me transfer it out. I didn’t manage to save anything. It was all taken. They took, in total, about £750k. It was a tough ordeal,” he mourns.
Cryptocurrency, a digital form of money that doesn’t require involvement from banks, is a ripe target for theft as it can be transferred irreversibly in seconds with little more than a password. In terms of the gainfulness of their crimes, cryptomuggers are like modern-day train bandits, funnelling large sums along the digital transaction ledger, known as the blockchain, in place of the locomotive.
Last year, a Florida man was jailed for leading a gang on a violent spree of home invasions and kidnappings to force victims to transfer over the contents of their crypto wallets. Meanwhile, in Lancashire in 2023, a 28-year-old was convicted for having £1.2m of stolen crypto in his account after a violent robbery.
In comparison to online bank accounts, which have encryption features and timed logouts, crypto apps have flimsy security measures, says David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. “It’s like carrying around little lumps of gold inside your phone and someone can steal them,” he warns. “It is so stupidly brittle. If your crypto gets stolen, you can’t get them back. They’re gone.
“These are not reversible transactions. Would you go down the pub with £10,000 cash in your pocket? Probably not. You need to treat crypto like a big pile of money.”
Atkinson, unfortunately, knew all of this. “I normally store all my crypto on a cold storage, on a USB stick, which means it can’t be touched or hacked,” he says. “The only reason I’d taken it off was to put a deposit down on a house. I was pretty distraught. It was my time to buy a nice home, and it was taken from me in a single moment.” Atkinson explains that he only managed to make so much from e-currency in the first place because he was a very early adopter of crypto trading. “I won’t make that amount again,” he laments.
Sam Kelly* was ordering an Uber home from a night out in Hackney when a man ran past him and snatched his unlocked phone out of his hand. “I followed him for two or three blocks, but he was rapid,” the 28-year-old says. “Two of his mates were following behind me so if I had caught up with him, I would have been f***ed either way.” After spending 45 minutes finding someone to help him get a taxi home, Kelly rushed to his laptop to deactivate his crypto accounts – which had already been drained, despite the muggers never threatening him for his passwords.
“I still don’t know how they managed to do it so quickly,” he says, refusing to specify how much money he lost but admitting he’d invested a five figure sum. “I did have security settings on both [accounts],” he adds, speculating that the thieves gained access via passwords stored elsewhere in his phone. The muggers rode around London in an Uber paid for by Kelly while bleeding him dry, so their location couldn’t be tracked. “They just discarded the phone the next day,” he says. “It was pretty demoralising. A decent amount of money was taken out of my account. The first few days [afterwards] were pretty tough.”
Both Atkinson and Kelly went to the police, who were essentially useless. Because there was no evidence that Atkinson’s life savings had been taken by armed thieves, all the force could log as stolen was his phone, which is classified as a petty crime. “They robbed my livelihood and the police weren’t going to do anything about it,” he fumes. Although a case file was opened for Kelly, investigating officers got key details of the incident, including the location, wrong multiple times. Ultimately, the only help they gave him was an advice leaflet in the post. “They weren’t useful at all,” he says. “It wasn’t the greatest experience.”
Phil Ariss, who previously headed the cryptocurrency team on the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s cybercrime programme, says that – despite common misconceptions – officers can locate stolen crypto with specialist tech that traces the assets as soon as thieves attempt to cash out into sterling or another currency. “Time is of the essence,” he says. But retrieving your lost cash isn’t a total lost cause. “With the right training and the right software, [law enforcement] can trace it,” he continues, adding that police should help victims with the process of retrieving their digital cash when they report the crime, as well as making sure they’re safe and well.
Kelly took matters into his own hands when this protocol failed to manifest. He complained to the two companies whose apps he had used that thieves had accessed his accounts despite the security measures that were in place, and raised the case with the financial ombudsman. “I’ve been able to get well over half of mine back,” he reveals. But Kelly was lucky, as crypto isn’t regulated in the UK, so investors aren’t automatically protected if they lose their money to theft, as they are with online banking. For Atkinson, who made the transactions himself – albeit at knifepoint – no such complaint is viable, and the emotional implications have been grim.
In 2025, a digital robbery can feel just as violating as a home break-in; we store more of ourselves in our Notes apps, iCloud photo albums, and WhatsApp messages than we do in our bedside drawer. Somewhat surprisingly, Atkinson is as rattled by this invasion as he is by the financial hit. “I was shaken up,” he admits. “These people had access to all my photos, all my emails. It’s not just a case of money, but everything I hold private that was stored on my phone. I felt physically and emotionally assaulted,” he reflects of the ordeal. “I’d lost all my privacy.”
*Names have been changed
