zlacker

Let's do some back-of-an-envelope stats on this.

Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.

We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:

    1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08

So 200 phones a day translates to about a 8% chance of getting your phone stolen over a period of ten years.

I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.

(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)

>>foldr+(OP)
That number also doesn’t take into account the significant number of tourists that visit every year, which from what I can see amounts to around ~20 million people.

>>foldr+(OP)
> 1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(36510) = 0.08

I think you mean:

    1 - ((45000-1)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08

Whilst it doesn't matter if the exponent is even (such as 3650 above) using (1-45000)/45000 will give a wrong estimation for odd exponents.