Head to toe in full riot gear with balaclavas pulled over their heads, the mass of public order officers quietly surrounded the mid-terrace suburban home.
At about 5am, the autumn chill was pierced by shouts of ‘police officers, this is a search warrant’ and the thump of heavy boots stomping through the doorway.
The front door had been found unlocked so the officer wielding a battering ram dropped it to the ground with a disappointed shrug and stormed into the house with the others.
A few minutes later, a tiny Bulgarian woman in a purple dressing gown was led from the home in handcuffs into a waiting police van.
Shortly afterwards, a man wearing a red football shirt, shorts and flip flops was given the same treatment.
This all-action raid on a home in Enfield, north London, was one of 30 simultaneous operations across London in the early hours of September 25.
The purpose of the huge operation, which involved 300 officers, was to round up the robbers, middlemen and kingpins responsible for the capital’s phone theft epidemic.
Two days earlier, two Afghan gang leaders thought to have been behind the export of 40,000 stolen devices in a single year were wrestled from their car and handcuffed in the street.
And the Bulgarian couple shaken from their peaceful suburban bed are allegedly part of a street gang that supplies these kingpins with phones snatched from unsuspecting Londoners.
For me, this early morning sting in suburbia marked another chapter in a story that began 6,000 miles away in the suffocating humidity of Kowloon, Hong Kong.
The phones currently being stuffed into evidence bags in Enfield would likely have been destined for the very same office block on the Hung To Road that I had visited with my colleague Miles Dilworth just two months ago.
We had seen with our own eyes the boxes containing thousands of iPhones gathered from every corner of the western world stacked into office units in the dizzying skyscrapers of Kwun Tong.
On the day the Daily Mail visited in July, there were easily more than one million used phones of varying origin, condition, brand and model for sale around the building.
The alleged thieves from Enfield could have made between £200 and £400 for each device they sold on to a handler in the UK, but thanks to a sophisticated supply chain and overwhelming overseas demand, the phones could fetch many times this on the other side of the world.
Just under a third of phones stolen in the capital are sent to Algeria, 20 per cent end up in mainland China and seven per cent in Hong Kong.
As Detective Inspector Mark Gavin explained, Apple does not have much of a retail footprint in North Africa so demand for second-hand devices is sky high.
Most phones made in China do not allow users to freely access the internet, creating a demand for European and US-made devices.
And Hong Kong – with its infrastructure and status as an international port – is the ideal hub to send the millions of phones stolen from around the world before they reach their final destination.
As one businessman from India who was making a bulk order to supply his electronics shop back home told us: ‘Hong Kong is the best place in the world to find every model at the best prices. The margins are thin but if you buy in bulk then it is perfect.’
This police operation, codenamed Echosteep, represented Scotland Yard’s intent to reform London’s image as Europe’s phone theft capital.
But it was a chance discovery that set the world’s biggest phone theft operation into motion.
Last Christmas Eve, a woman tracked her stolen iPhone to a warehouse by Heathrow Airport.
She told a security guard who happened to be a former Metropolitan Police officer, and the pair tracked the signal to a cardboard box labelled ‘batteries’ that was bound for Hong Kong.
Inside the package was the woman’s phone – along with 894 others. All had been stolen.
The force spent the next nine months identifying suspects and building a detailed intelligence picture of the sophisticated supply chain that was fuelling a £70million crime epidemic on Britain’s streets.
A team of elite officers who normally investigate firearms and drug offences was drafted in to join the investigation.
On September 20, a man was arrested at Heathrow Airport with ten stolen phones, two iPads and two Rolex watches.
This individual had travelled between London and Algeria more than 200 times in the past two years.
Three days later, the two men suspected of leading the entire export operation were arrested in northeast London.
The Afghan nationals, codenamed Heron and Seagull, were grabbed from their specially adapted people carrier that had become a mobile ‘chop shop’ for stolen phones.
And two days after the kingpins were detained, the simultaneous raids including the operation at the Enfield home took place.
In the past two weeks, the force has made 46 arrests related to phone thefts, executed 49 search warrants and recovered more than 2,000 stolen phones.
Officers have seized more than £200,000 in criminal proceeds and a total of 4,000 stolen iPhones are now in the evidence room at a west London police station.
Hailed by commissioner Sir Mark Rowley as the biggest counter phone theft operation that has ever happened in the world, detectives who have spent almost a year on the investigation can rest assured they have put a major dent in a crime that has blighted the capital.
But as long as there are overseas buyers willing to pay huge premiums – and tech giants refusing to add measures such as ‘kill switches’ to the phones – there will be no room for complacency.
