The Scotland Yard police in the UK used a low tech approach to gain data from the iPhone of a criminal, Gabriel Yew. Undercover officers trailed the suspect, and robbed the phone from him just as he was making a phone call. Then officers in the squad kept manually
swiping the screen to prevent the phone from locking up, till the incriminating data was recovered from the phone. BBC has reported one of the most innovative methods of gaining access to the data in an iPhone by law enforcement authorities.
In the US, Apple and FBI had a big standoff over unlocking an iPhone belonging to a terrorist. Apply CEO Tim Cook said that complying with the request of the FBI to unlock the phone would be bad for America. The FBI eventually got access to the phone with the help of third party researchers which included a piece of hardware meant specifically to bypass the security measures. The FBI apparently paid the researchers a hefty amount to unlock the phone. Although the standoff ended, there were unanswered questions about how the FBI bypass would affect regular users, and what would happen the next time FBI wanted access to a device.
The Cybercrime Unit of the Scotland Yard wanted to avoid lengthy legal wranglings, or having to pay for a bypass method. The legal options available to the police did not include obtaining access to the phone by force, or making the criminal unlock the phone. The police found out that they could mug the criminal to gain access to the phone, and they executed the innovative plan to get access to the contents of a device.
The efforts paid off, with a hundred more suspects uncovered, and incriminating data found on the criminal activities of a network. The criminals were using fake credit cards to purchase luxuey items across Europe. The investigators uncovered a factory with thousands of blank credit cards that could be programmed.
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