On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, second-hand devices with U.S. serial numbers line the shelves in electronic stores. In district 4 of the city, the store Van Phat Mobile is no different, with tens of second-hand Apple devices in its storefront.
It is unclear how the devices ended up there. The street outside is lined with other similar stores touting hundreds of shiny Apple electronics.
But it highlights how large demand for cheap, second hand Apple devices in countries like Vietnam may be contributing to a global supply chain of contraband phones, laptops and tablets for many years, unveiling a long-existing network of smuggling of stolen goods from California to Asia.
For years, California has tried to address the trend. Court records show that the Bay Area, along with the state, are often the target of organized crime linked to overseas smuggling. Interviews with experts and federal agencies like the U.S. Customs and Border Protection reveal little oversight into eliminating the pipeline.
Scraping 300 posts from the San Francisco subreddit showed 50 instances of devices being stolen. At least half mention them ending up in Asia, in particular in countries like China and Vietnam. Many also mention getting scam messages asking them to unlock their devices. Apple was sued in 2025 for one such case of an iCloud account being erased after a phone was stolen and thieves were able to generate a recovery key.
The word rain above was made from this scrape, with the size of each word being relative to how often each word was mentioned.
Apple devices from the U.S. are often considered of higher quality thus making them highly sought after and stolen, said Randall Knox, the lawyer who represented Quoc Le, the defendant in a large smuggling case in San Francisco.
His client was involved in smuggling stolen devices from the city to Vietnam, his country of origin, while using his wife’s Boba store as a front for this reason. Le ended up serving time after an operation led by former district attorney, Chesa Boudin, linked him to stolen devices planted by local police.
A scrape of news stories online and interviews with phone traders in Vietnam shows devices often first end up in Shenzen, China before they are smuggled across the border to Vietnam to be sold.
However, Vietnam imposed strict rules on smuggled goods from China after striking a 20% tariff deal with the U.S. last year. Vietnam is a major garment supplier for major U.S. brands, accounting for $44 billion USD in exports in 2024 and ranking as the world's second-largest apparel exporter.
Soon, stories emerged of smuggled Chinese goods being labelled as Vietnamese for export to dodge high tariffs on China. The Vietnamese government has since cracked down on goods coming in from China, as well as demanding invoices for all goods imported into the country.
When devices leave the country, their first stop is most likely China. Here, the devices are either taken apart for parts, or scammers try to hack into iCloud accounts to make the device usable again. Otherwise, the devices cannot be used if they are marked stolen and remotely erased by Apple, said Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“In some ways, older phones can be more vulnerable to certain types of issues, mostly because they stop receiving security and software updates at a certain point. Some of those vulnerabilities will be exploitable by someone who steals a phone, while other vulnerabilities may only really be accessible to more sophisticated tools, like what law enforcement has access to,” said Klosowski.
Now, Apple devices with U.S. serial numbers are commonplace in major Vietnamese stores like Thế Giới Di Động and Cellphones or even in smaller stores in district 4 of Ho Chi Minh City.
When shopkeepers are asked about the origin of devices, they say devices are returned by customers who want an upgrade and often are bought from the same store.
This may be true for the larger retailers that have a good track record, according to a local reseller, who agreed to be quoted as Lee.
Santa Clara DA Edward Liang said it's tough enough to find rings in the Bay Area or the country, and it is too difficult to fish out the loophole that is allowing devices to leave the country.
One stolen device from Oakland ended up in district 4 of Ho Chi Minh City, at a store named Van Phat Mobile. When the store was questioned about the ones with U.S. serial numbers that were taunted to customers for higher quality, the store assistants did not have proof that they were not originally stolen or smuggled.
They simply say customers got them in the U.S. or a family member from the U.S. gifted the item to them.
Theft in California often occurs through organized crime.
Electronic device theft is a common occurrence in the Bay Area. The California Highway Patrol, or CHP, salvaged over $200,000 worth of stolen electronics headed for Merced in just one bust in 2023, and most notably a high profile case in 2019, when Oakland resident Shuo Zeng was killed in a laptop robbery.
Many organized operations also have been discovered in phone shops in Hayward and fronts like Boba Shops in San Francisco, with one in particular from Santa Clara County in 2018 that mentions the use of FedEx and the Port of Oakland to ship the devices to Vietnam, clearly bypassing checks.
Bert Feuss was one such victim who was later paid restitution.
He parked in the Mission District of San Francisco to attend his wife’s work party at a local non profit. He had just gotten off work so did not have time to leave his laptop at home and instead decided to keep it in the back of his car, covered and hidden from plain sight. The couple returned to the car broken into and his work bag gone later in the night. Bert, a long time resident was frustrated by the scene being a second time victim of a break in, but had seen an uptick in property crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, including in his neighborhood grocery store.
Feuss’ device was eventually found when, according to court records, a ring selling and exchanging stolen electronics devices was busted in a parking lot in Santa Clara Valley in December 2018. Seven people were charged. The ring was shipping devices in containers to Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as reselling in swap meets in the Bay Area, according to court records. These swap meets were confirmed as a commonplace for such activities on the Reddit scrape too.
Boudin knew this was a problem back in 2022. He built the case against Le at the time, and did so because only 2% of auto burglaries were being solved in San Francisco. Car break ins in particular, where most devices seem to be stolen, are hard to solve and many people don’t even report the crimes,Boudin said. In 2024 alone, there were over 463000 vehicle break ins reported in the state.
“With the tremendous wealth disparities we have in the Bay Area, it is not surprising we have these crime trends,” said Boudin. “When people know they are going to be arrested is much more important than the punishment."
But it's been a year since Prop 36 passed in California, increasing punishment for theft and property crimes, allowing prosecutors to build cases across counties, and to no longer have to prove a vehicle was locked to charge someone with car burglary, where personal devices are often stolen.
It also raises theft offenses to a felony if you have a prior conviction. But since its passage, it’s been received with mixed results.
“We have 90,000 people in prison, Prop 36 is going in the wrong direction.The trend may accelerate or not next year. But there is concern we will reverse the progress California has made in reducing its prison population,” said Thomas M. Nosewicz, legal director of the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code at the California Policy Lab.
Nosewicz says mental health diversion is a better way forward since a lot of people in the criminal justice system have underlying mental health or substance abuse issues. The prop gives the power for prosecutors to determine treatment and so there are a lot of differences across counties. The committee also recommended that the state should pay restitution upfront and recover it, rather than burdening defendants that may already be struggling.
But property crime was falling even before Prop 36 in the state, and has continued to drop.
The assumption was that current law did not cover brazen crimes. This wasn’t true as they and the prop took money away from crime victims provided by Prop 47, added Nosewicz.
“Violent crime went up in the pandemic, so we are sort of returning to pre-pandemic levels and even lower,” added Nosewicz. “Length of a sentence is not what deters someone, but the chance of getting caught. It's about how we are spending our resources.”
Incarcerating people leads them to commit crimes so reducing incarceration may have helped or a drop in youth crime as more young people are glued to their phones too.
It’s rare not to see an Apple device in Vietnam.
Storefront continues to push selling second-hand goods at discounted prices — prices that often 30% percent cheaper than here in the U.S.
Back in California, property crime has been falling, but since Prop 36 went into effect a year ago, theft arrests as a result of Prop 36 have accounted for 3.9% of all arrests in the state. Prop 36 was backed by the retail lobby, police departments and district attorney offices. Boudin feels the way Prop 36 was marketed was dishonest as a way to solve homelessness and get people into drug treatment with no money for them.
A late 2024 UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) poll found that Proposition 36 was highly popular, with 60% of likely California voters supporting the tough-on-crime measure
“Crime is always a reality for some number of people who are victims but if you look at the macro trend, is it positive,” added Chesa.
Professor Majo George from the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City thinks the Vietnamese government’s crackdown will mean contraband devices may become more expensive in Vietnam as the supply tightens.
For people like Vietnamese journalist, Cong Khai, his device suddenly stopped working, and he had no choice but to buy a second hand device to continue his work.
“Many people don’t have [the] budget, so they have to buy used devices for big brands,” he said. “There are a wide variety of products, and I don’t think I can know if that device was stolen because I don’t know a lot about technology.”