Alarm bells ring for mobile phone users as gangs go after handsets

Like most Asian cities, Bangkok fell in love with the mobile phone truly, madly, deeply.

Queues would form outside stores for the latest limited edition model, and one's phone was flaunted as a badge of wealth and status. Designer ringtones and cute covers only upped one's cool quotient.

But that has all changed in the space of a few short months, thanks to gangs of increasingly brazen and violent phone thieves.

After six deaths, scores of beatings and slashings and hundreds of robberies, mobile phones have taken on a new complexion. In the trendy shopping precincts, you're more likely to see hurried, furtive conversations and phones being jammed deep into bags and pockets than long, loud talks on expensive handsets dangled from neck chains.

Police have hit back hard, rounding up two gangs from a blacklist of hundreds of suspected thieves in the past week, as well as cracking down on the profusion of stores and booths selling second-hand phones of dubious origin.

More than 1,600 vendors have now registered their businesses with the police, while 49 who refused to do so or did not keep proper records of customers and sellers have been arrested.

Deputy Metropolitan Police Commissioner Major-General Theparat Ratanawanit said that while these measures had led to a sharp drop in phone thefts in the past two weeks, tourists and locals alike should exercise caution when using mobile phones in public.