In February 2025, the Metropolitan Police ran a week-long operation against the trade in stolen phones in London. Officers seized more than 1,000 stolen handsets and arrested 230 people, targeting a trade the Met valued at around £50 million a year (Police Professional, February 2025).
The operation went after the people handling and exporting phones, not only the street thieves. As the Met’s Commander Owain Richards put it, criminals can “easily sell on stolen devices either here or abroad.” Alongside it, the Home Secretary was due to chair a summit with law enforcement and industry on tackling smartphone theft.
For anyone who insures, buys or resells phones, that’s the uncomfortable part: stolen devices don’t disappear. They come back into circulation, and some of them come through legitimate channels.
The IMEI is how a phone is identified
Every phone has an IMEI, a 15-digit number that identifies that individual handset. It’s how networks identify a device, and how a phone reported stolen can be blocked. The Met’s asks to the industry included making the IMEI accessible from the lock screen of every smartphone, so it can be checked quickly, and stopping stolen phones from reconnecting to cloud services so they can’t easily be resold.
But an IMEI is only useful if it belongs to the phone in front of you. That’s where most remote processes fall down.
A typed IMEI proves nothing
In most online journeys, the IMEI comes from a form. The customer types it in, or copies it from a box, a receipt or an old account. None of that proves the number belongs to the handset you’re insuring or buying:
- A trade-in quote can be built on the IMEI of a clean phone, while a different one goes in the post.
- An insurance policy can be taken out on one handset’s IMEI, with a claim later made for another.
- A resale listing can quote the IMEI of a phone that has nothing to do with the one being sold.
Typos make it worse. A mistyped IMEI often still looks valid at a glance, and then matches nothing.
Capture it on the device, then check it
A Lustre check takes the IMEI from the phone itself. During the check, the customer types *#06# into their phone app, which shows the IMEI on screen, and takes a screenshot. The number is read from that screenshot on the phone, and only a properly formed 15-digit IMEI with a valid check digit is accepted.
It’s then looked up independently and matched against the make and model you gave when you created the check. If someone says they’re trading in a recent flagship and the IMEI belongs to a different model, you’ll see it.
Two other parts of the check help tie that IMEI to the phone in the photos:
- Same-device verification. The screen photo is taken in a mirror while the phone displays a one-time code for that check, so the photo has to show the code issued to that check.
- One continuous session. The photos and the IMEI screenshot come from the same phone, in the same browser session, in about two minutes.
You get back the IMEI and its independent lookup alongside the condition of the screen and back, by API or webhook. You can then run it through whatever blocklist or fraud checks you already use.
Where this matters
- Insurers can confirm the insured phone at policy sale and again at claim time, and see when the two don’t match. We’ve written about the condition side of that in pre-existing damage and phone claims.
- Trade-in and resale businesses can tie the phone they quoted to the IMEI it reported, before it’s posted. More on that in why trade-in quotes get cut on arrival.
Stolen phones will keep looking for a way back into the market. Checking which phone you’re dealing with before it changes hands is a simple way to make that harder.
If you’d like to see the IMEI step in a real check, get in touch.
Sources
- Police Professional, 1,000 stolen phones seized and 230 arrested in one week during targeted operation by MPS, 6 February 2025.