Stick-up at the cellphone store: USA's new heists go after iPhones and not bank vaults.

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The man in the Maryland cell phone store quits pretending he’s a customer when his partners enter behind him brandishing guns. 

“Yeah, you know what time it is,” he says, drawing a gun and pointing it at the clerk, according to federal court documents. “If you don’t want to die today, do what I say.”

He leads the employee to a safe in the back and orders him to open it. But it’s not stacks of cash he’s after. Today’s stickup artist is after something else: smartphones.

The trio cleans out the safe and leaves the store in Owings Mills, Maryland, with a grand total of $48,767 worth of Apple and Samsung Galaxy devices— 76 in total, according to federal court filings. They also take $322 from the store register.

It’s the final heist in a spree that’s seen the robbers take roughly $120,000 worth of stolen phones across four stores around Baltimore, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The case out of Maryland is the latest in what criminology experts and law enforcement see as the modern-day form of bank robbery— with significantly higher takes. In the United States, bank robbers net just over $4,000 per robbery, according to FBI statistics.

If noted gangster John Dillinger were alive today, he'd be robbing cellphone stores instead of banks.

The heists have grown to the point that federal agents call the trade “phone trafficking” in reference to the vast sums criminals aim to score and sell in far-flung black markets such as Iran and North Korea.

Doug McKelway, a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s Major Theft Enterprises division, told Paste BN that phone store heists spurred by international organized crime elements came to the bureau's attention just a few years ago.

“These cases start out with crimes that appear to be low-level street crimes the FBI would not normally investigate,” McKelway said. “But then when you take a closer look you see it’s a transnational crime.”

The take? Anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per phone for the lowest level of criminal involved. Ringleaders make millions of dollars, McKelway said. 

“It got them sent to jail for a long time, so I don't know if it was worth it,” he said, recalling the first major phone heist case he handled.

They are big-money heists that carry big prison terms. Xavier Jones - a 26-year-old involved in all four robberies in late 2020 including Owings Mills - was sentenced to 22 years in prison in February after pleading guilty to multiple counts of brandishing a firearm and interference with interstate commerce by robbery. Accomplice Rico Dashiell, 26, pleaded guilty for his role and was sentenced to 12 years in prison; Donte Herring, 25, was convicted at trial and sentenced to 20 years.

Jones recognized going after highly valued but poorly secured technology offered a big payday but technology was also his undoing. The crew failed to notice a GPS-tracking device in the Owings Mills store loot. Federal agents tracked them down using the device to put them in a plain old-fashioned prison.

FBI agents ‘pull the thread’ in Dallas

The case where FBI agents saw phone heists were more than just stickups came in Texas in 2020, McKelway said.

Law enforcement in Texas alerted the FBI to an astounding number of phone heists at Dallas-area stores. Federal agents began investigating and uncovered that the case was anything but local.

“As we began to pull the thread a little bit, we saw there were armed robbery crews coming to Dallas from all around the country,” McKelway said. 

The draw, according to the FBI, was a store that helped move stolen phones out of the country. 

“It was this one particular fence that drew them there,” said Mckelway, using law enforcement parlance for a store that deals in stolen goods. “Word got out in criminal networks that this store was paying good money for phones.”

The store dealt out over 70,000 stolen phones for $100 million. Countries accepting the phones included China and the United Arab Emirates, according to federal court filings in the Eastern District of Texas.

“That case really opened our eyes to what's going on beneath the surface in this realm that is the theft of phones all around the country,” said McKelway.

Prosecution of the 101 people charged is ongoing but 42 people have been sentenced since June, according to Jillian C. Kaehler, an FBI spokesperson. They received sentences of up to 12 years and four and a half on average. 

The two brothers responsible for moving the phones overseas, Abdul Basit and Arsalan Bhangda, were sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $12 million in restitution each, according to reporting by the Fort-Worth Star Telegram.

More: Group of 'violent' cell phone robbers stole a fortune from AT&T stores, get stiff prison terms

Bank robbing for the 21st century

The trend of phone store heists is so new that criminologists told Paste BN that little research exists on the topic. 

But long-standing criminology theories make sense of the trend, according to Dr. Seungmug “Zech” Lee, a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M International University: Criminals go after easy targets and when a target becomes difficult they find another.

Bank robberies, said Lee, used to be a relatively easy way to score big. 

At the turn of the century, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their crew members made off with some $37,000 in gold - about $1.4 million today - in robbing a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 1900, author C. F. Eckhardt writes in Tales of Badmen, Bad Women, and Bad Places: Four Centuries of Texas Outlawry.

Bank security have vastly improved since then. Common measures include everything from alarm systems and surveillance cameras to exploding dye packs and electronic tracking devices, according to FBI bank theft data. 

The Bank Protection Act of 1968 mandated that banks nationwide improve security, according to Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Bank robberies have fallen to record lows since then and the average payout has dropped to about just $4,000, according to FBI statistics. Federal agents registered 1,263 bank robberies in 2023. That’s an 80% decrease from 2003 when there were 7,465 robberies.

“If a note passer goes into one of these banks today, he will get some cash but not very much,” said McCrie, referring to a preferred method nowadays of simply passing a note demanding money to a teller rather than a guns-blazing stickup. “Their picture will be taken and there may be an exploding device in the cash, so it’s not a very good crime to commit anymore.”

New American stickup artists

More criminals are turning to cellphone stores.

Accounts of holdups in court filings read like modern-day escapades of Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson— iconic, audacious American gangsters known for thoroughly planned bank heists throughout the Midwest.

Robdarius Williams, D’Maurah Bryant and Quintez Tucker were sentenced in October to a collective 65 years in prison after hitting eight cellphone stores in Indiana over 25 days, according to the Justice Department.

They entered stores brandishing guns and ordering people to get on the ground, according to Bryant’s guilty plea agreement. One robber waved an AR-style rifle in the face of a two-year-old during the course of a hold up of an Indianapolis T-Mobile store. Bryant hit a Verizon store employee in the face with a gun. He felt the worker was moving too slowly.

Some thieves became brutal.

Lawrence McKay and his crew showed an escalating pattern of violence in robbing six cellphone stores in and around Philadelphia, according to federal court filings.

McKay and his crew left victims tied up in the bathroom by the fourth robbery, according to federal court documents out of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. On the fifth robbery, one crew member entered the store and immediately shot an employee. McKay committed the worst of the violence: on the sixth and final robbery, he shot one of the victims in the stomach and then proceeded to kick him in the face.

The 37-year-old McKay was sentenced to 32 years in prison in February. He plead guilty to six counts of robbery and multiple counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence.

What are phone store owners doing about it?

Some cellphone store owners have begun using security measures similar to what banks use. 

Stores may hide tracking devices among phones, like the store in Owings Mill, Maryland, that led police to Jones and his crew.

A stickup crew out of Chicago hit a snag at a T-Mobile store in Rockford, Illinois, when the phones were kept in a safe that only opened at designated times. They were left to steal devices left outside the safe and nearly $600 from the register, court filings say.

The six-man crew — which robbed five other cellphone stores in Illinois — received a collective 60 years in prison for the robberies. The last member pleaded guilty in July, the Justice Department said.

Even as some stores adapt, many do not. McCrie said little will change until stores nationwide adopt better standards. 

McCrie said he first noticed thieves targeting phone stores around 10 years ago and that heists have only become more frequent. Store security has hardly improved while the newest smartphones now cost around $1,000.

"Not only have these incidents begun but there is no concerted program or plan to mitigate these risks," he said. “It’s not surprising that this has become an attractive area for criminal activity... Look at the vulnerability that cellphone stores have, they don't expect to be robbed the way banks expect to be robbed.”

Cellphone providers (try to) punch back

Network providers have taken steps to undercut phone trafficking by blocking the use of stolen devices.

The GSMA, a phone trade organization, maintains a massive database of stolen phones that over 100 providers worldwide refer to when granting a phone access to a network.

Major companies including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon subscribe and add to the organization’s list of stolen devices. But not everyone participates. Among countries that don’t are China, Russia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, according to court documents in the Dallas case.

Stolen phones blocked from accessing cell networks can still be used to access Wi-Fi.

Transnational crime ‘whack-a-mole’

Special Agent McKelway describes stopping phone trafficking as akin to whack-a-mole under the circumstances.

Investigators can root out fence operators and shut down significant local networks - as in Dallas - but new ones pop up around the country. Plus thieves resell phones online.

“They’re easy to get rid of and there’s a huge demand for them and there’s lots of ways that they end up overseas and the internet certainly makes it easier,” McKelway said. “There’s just a huge demand for these phones around the world.”

Michael Loria is a national reporter on the Paste BN breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@usatoday.com, @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585.