Worried that nabbing one of the iPhone 6S Pluses is going to break the bank? Be glad you don't live in Brazil. Due to tariffs and taxes in the South American country, an iPhone 6 costs over $1,200, National Geographic reports. As a result, smuggling phones illegally into Brazil is a billion-dollar business — and the phones being moved into the country are typically stolen from the United States.
Because American smartphones are mainly subsidized through contracts with carriers, smartphones in the U.S. are relatively inexpensive. But in Brazil, it would take the average person 41 days of work to even afford the price tag ($1,286). In Vietnam, it takes the average person over 181 days of work to afford an iPhone.
It's no wonder then that there's a large overseas market for stolen phones. In 2014, 2.1 million smartphones were stolen in the U.S.:
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According to numbers gathered by Sprint lawyers during court proceedings with traffickers, the vast majority of the stolen phones reviewed were sent to Hong Kong, where Sprint attorney James Baldinger says they're "unlocked, re-flashed, re-kitted—which means they'll get put in a new box with new accessories and with an instruction manual that's in the language of whatever the destination country is."The destination country can be anywhere the phones might fetch a high price — countries like Brazil, where subsidies aren't common and various fees hike the legal price of cell phones into the four-figure range. [National Geographic]
Stolen American phones have been found on every continent on Earth aside from Antarctica. Read the whole story over at National Geographic.
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