Phone Theft Falling in Wrexham

Wrexham saw phone thefts drop to a five-year low back in 2019, and it looks as though they’re staying there.

According to our data, there was a total of 1 phone theft recorded in Wrexham last year – a figure that’s stayed the same since 2018. The city’s phone theft figures hit a five-year high in 2018 with just 7 thefts, falling to just one a year since,

The latest 2022 data shows that:

• £355 worth of phones were stolen in Wrexham.
• On average, 1 phone was stolen in Wrexham every 365 days.
• 1 in 61,603 people in Wrexham had a phone stolen in 2022.

Wrexham is one of the UK’s safest cities with just one phone theft every year for the last four years. And it looks as though numbers will be staying in single digits for the near future.

Don’t want to be one of the handful of phone theft victims in St Davids? Check out our guide to stop thieves from stealing your mobile phone to keep your hands on your handset.

Cardiff was the worst-hit Welsh city with 234 reported phone thefts, accounting for 34.4% of the Welsh total. We ranked the cities proportionally, using the number of thefts per thousand people to see which ones were hit worse.

This time, St Davids came out on top with 1.88 thefts per thousand people, but since the city is so small with just 1,600 residents, we felt it was unfair to include it in our rankings.

As for the lowest phone theft rates, Bangor and St Asaph both saw 0 phone thefts in 2022, with Bangor clinching the title of Safest UK City due to its higher population.

Get Phone Repairs founder Ryan Leston said: “We’re seeing a huge rise in mobile phone theft across the UK. Thousands of mobile phones are stolen in cities across the country, most commonly through pickpocketing and table surfing. Police forces all over the country are backing local initiatives to tackle this rising crime, but the best way to avoid being part of our stats is to take preventative measures. Avoid using your mobile in crowded areas and you’ll stand a much better chance of hanging onto it. Thieves are far more likely to target people they know have high-end devices. So, keep your smartphone out of sight.”

As you might expect, phone theft is on the rise across the whole country. There were a total of 135,147 phone thefts in the United Kingdom in 2022.

The value of those stolen handsets came to over £47 million.

National figures reached a low point in 2020 with the total number of reported phone thefts reaching just 89,252. However, it’s been on the rise ever since, with numbers increasing by 35.9% last year alone.

Here’s how the individual countries fared:

• England racked up 133,464 phone thefts in 2020.
• Northern Ireland saw a more modest 1,003 phone thefts.
• Wales saw even less – just 680 phone thefts all year.

Note: Police Scotland refused to supply data to our study.

Again, we chose to look closer at the figures, using our PTI to more accurately compare the countries. Even then, England comes out on top with 2.81 thefts per thousand people. Northern Ireland had a PTI of 0.53 while Wales saw just 0.2 phone thefts per thousand people.

For more information, check out our full UK phone theft stats.