When it comes to stealing smartphones, the most obvious, riskiest way to do so is to smash into a store and grab as many as possible. Or just walk straight into a store and grab as many as possible. Obviously, there’s a high chance of being caught.

Then, there’s the black hat method — hack into UK carrier Three‘s handset upgrade servers and rewrite shipping addresses.

Three alerted its customers on Facebook to its investigation in association with police and other authorities on the “attempted fraud issue” yesterday.

The National Crime Agency actually made three arrests regarding this issue on Wednesday. Three UK later stated that the suspects, who are free on bail, may have utilized authorized logins into the system in order to manipulate records and intercept “high-end smartphones”.

PCWorld was told by Three that no “customer payment, card information or bank account information” was accessed, though other information like names, addresses, dates of birth could have been tampered with.

But about how many smartphones were stolen through this scheme, it was eight. That’s compared to 400 phones stolen from retail stores in four weeks.

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