To me the surprising claim would be that phone theft is common - I don’t think I know of anyone who’s had their phone stolen - but if you want stats, sticking with the UK, here’s the official statistics on robbery and ‘theft from a person’: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
It’s more work than I have time for now, but I don’t think that any of the headline figures can be regarded as ‘common’.
More emotionally: Maybe it’s just my age showing, but it is notable to me that nowadays we’re all carrying around $1000 items at all times, and muggings aren’t through the roof. Perhaps society is kinder than I gave it credit for, but I think that the lack of utility of those $1000 items if you steal them (so, they’re not really worth $1000 to a mugger) is a major part of the reason they’re not.
It's also going to make the targets even less likely to report the crime to police as well. 'Hi, I don't live in this country and I think my phone might have been stolen somewhere at some point in time over the past several hours, maybe.' is not even going to be investigated by the police, even if somebody does decide to file a report.
Come to think of it, this may all be yet another reason why thieves don't tend to abuse personal information. That sort of stuff is going to get reported and can be viably investigated by the police.
