Not all phones being trafficked abroad are stolen through street theft. In fact, the vast majority of the phones that investigators in the Floarea case came across were Apple iPhones that had been purchased fraudulently from mobile providers. This process is called credit muling.

Credit muling involves a “handler” who either bribes or tricks people, often from vulnerable communities, into bulk purchasing contract-subsidized cell phones. The handler then sells the phones to middlemen, like Floarea, who have connections abroad.

In the United States phones are subsidized through contracts with carriers on a level not seen in most of the world. Because you can obtain an $800 phone for $200 with a service contract, there is a greater incentive to game the system and the payoff can be huge.

The California Department of Justice established an eCrime Unit in 2011 to investigate and prosecute cases just like these.

Here is what the eCrime Unit has learned in their investigations.

Phones stolen in the United States have been found on every continent except Antarctica. In Latin America smartphones can fetch a much higher price than they can in the US. Import taxes and tariffs can make a legal iPhone cost more than $1000 in countries like Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina.

With the legal price of a highly desirable smartphone so high, many people naturally turn to the black market. In many countries, the average worker would have to work for months to be able to afford a legal phone.

Interpol reports that cell phone theft organizations smuggling across borders in Latin America make an average of $550,000 per day. Many of these traffickers are connected to drug cartels who are investing in smuggling cell phones because they are considered low risk and high reward compared to narcotics.

Diminishing the international black market could hinge on the ability to render the phone useless immediately after a robbery. Preliminary results from the implementation of anti-cell phone theft technology in the United States look promising, however the problem is far from resolved.

In an effort to decrease cell phone theft and undercut the black market, California passed a so-called “kill switch” bill last year. Starting on July 1, 2015 phone manufacturers must include security software in all new smartphones sold in the state. The kill switch will allow owners to remotely disable a stolen phone and render its software inoperable - at least in the United States.

One of the original proponents of the kill switch legislation was San Francisco District Attorney, George Gascon.

Working with other politicians in New York and London, Gascon has become a prominant anti-cell phone theft advocate.

Minnesota passed a similar kill switch law in 2014, and eight other states have begun the legislative process to follow suit. Two bills currently in front of Congress could make the kill switch a federal mandate.

In 2013, Apple added the “activation lock” feature, which is essentially their version of this kill-switch. iPhone thefts in San Francisco dropped 38 percent since Apple introduced this security feature. In the same amount of time, the theft of Samsung phones - which don’t yet have this kind of software - increased by 12 percent.

Gascon says the point of implementing the kill switch is to eliminate the incentive for stealing phones in the first place. Deactivated, a stolen cell phone is less likely hold its black market value.

For manufacturers and wireless carriers, this is a bittersweet deal because cell phone insurance is a billion dollar industry. A report from 2013 found that the top four wireless carriers in the U.S. brought in almost $8 billion dollars just from protection plans and top electronics retailers received another $4.3 billion in new insurance contracts.

While many experts and anti-cell phone theft organizations celebrate kill switch laws as a step in the right direction, some worry the technology alone is not comprehensive enough to eliminate the issue altogether.