What do thieves do with stolen items?

Just a qiestion since i just got mugged last night and luckily( to me anyway) they only took my phone compared to wallet. Kinda want to know what they will do with it, i know they will either try to sell it quickly or try and get info off it, but they were in late teens/ early 20's so i don't think they would try and get info off it, although i already erased the info on it. But who would they sell it to? Can't really sell to a pawn shop i think since they would be suspicious of a random teen walking in with a cased iphone. Pretty sure they wouldn't scrap it for parts. Maybe try and sell it to someone they know?

Call it up… Talk to em. And meet with him with a cop…

They'd sell It online. Ebay or craigslist. At supermarkets and walmart now they have a machine that takes old phones and pays out cash too. They might use that.

There's a whole underground network of fences for stolen property which end up exporting the items to other countries where they are resold on the black market. That only works for some iPhones… Others have to be disassembled to remove and replace certain key internal parts. Because of this, the amounts paid for stolen iPhones are fairly small.

other uses in the underground network -- as 'burner' phones to arrange other illegal [usually drug] deals. Obviously, these stop working as soon as you contact your ISP and turn the number off. So, they're used quickly to make long distance international calls to burner phones in central America.

They will connect it to iTunes, put it into recovery mode which deletes everything and makes it into a brand new phone, then sells it for money.

Sell them for cash

Muggers aren't master criminals but desperate low life drug addicts. Increasingly, they are juvenile stealth muggers. They might raise a tenner from robbing someone, maybe fifty, maybe nothing. Fortunately we live in an increasingly cashless society and stolen smartphones are almost worthless as new ones are so cheap.

I'm glad you're okay and seem to be fairly philosophical about your ordeal!

They lie and sell it on Craigslist, eBay, etc. It's a money game.

They try to resell it as quickly as possible to get some money. If its an iphone then put it in lost mode and put a msg on the screen saying stolen, that basically makes it useless and their sale of it goes way down once its that way.