Stolen phones are being buried in community gardens, according to volunteers who keep finding them in their flower beds.
The centrally located Phoenix Garden sits just off Shaftesbury Avenue in Covent Garden, and has been home to dozens of stolen phones, which reportedly get stashed there after being stolen from the West End.
Volunteers at the garden say the thieves try to hide the phones in the gardens, which they retrieve and try to return to their owners or the police.
Since more phones are being unearthed, fewer are being discovered – indicating that the thieves are catching on.
The manager of Phoenix Garden, Louise Gates, told the BBC she routinely found phones "thrown over the fence from the night before" when she opened the garden in the morning.
She said: "Some of our volunteers have dug up phones wrapped in tin foil."
Tin foil obscures the device’s location, helping phone snatchers conceal the device for longer.
It has been reported that thieves, often operating on electric bikes around target areas like Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, are using the gardens to stash the devices until a later date.
Ms Gates added that sometimes victims will arrive at the garden after following the device’s location on the Apple “Find My” app.
She explained that if she were able to find the emergency contact information on the phone, she would call the number provided.
"They're all really so grateful, which is nice," she told the BBC.
"Other times I charge it up, but nobody rings, I don't know who it belongs to, or I can't find them on social media, so I just take it to the police station."
Another volunteer at the garden, Ron Chenery, said finding missing phones was a regular event for him.
"Most of us love the garden so much, we're constantly out in the fresh air. If we see something, we hand it in," he said.
Elliot Hughes, a community worker who helps young people visit the garden and connect with nature, added that it was a good opportunity to teach local students about the wider risks of phone theft across the capital.
He explained: "The best we can do is give awareness,
"There's young people now, walking around central London on their phones, in the middle of the street, which are essentially £1,000 computers.
"So [I am] just highlighting to them maybe the things they shouldn't be doing."
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson confirmed that local officers have stepped up patrols in the West End to identify potential phone thieves.
"By intensifying our efforts, we're catching more perpetrators and protecting people from having their phones stolen in the capital, and have reduced theft by 16% since April.
"We're also dismantling organised crime groups suspected of large-scale phone theft."
The Met has urged phone companies like Apple and Samsung to improve security that would make it more difficult for thieves to sell the stolen devices.
London remains Europe’s phone snatch capital with 80,000 devices stolen last year – one every six minutes.
TV presenter and model Alexa Chung became the latest celebrity victim as she told last week told how she was targeted by a thief in east London.
Former tennis star Annabel Croft, 59, had her handset taken “clean out of her hands” by a masked thief on a bicycle outside King’s Cross station.
Socialite Lady Victoria Hervey, 49, was left shaken after being mugged for mobile phone in Pimlico by an e-bike rider.
Emmy Award winning actress Susan Hampshire, 88, had her phone and purse robbed on the London Underground.
Detectives recently smashed an international crime network suspected of smuggling tens of thousands of phones stolen in London out of the UK.
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