My missus "left" her phone in a taxi in Leeds the other week, and between losing it, and it being blocked (automatically, kudos to O2 and their monitoring system), the taxi driver had managed to make about £50 worth of calls to Pakistan over the course of about 3 hours.

I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of stolen mobiles were used for overseas calls (hence untraceable), before being binned.

Mobile phones are sooooo 2005. The yobs are stealing MP3 players now - why steal a mobile and have to go to all the trouble and cost of reprogramming it, when you can nick a player, get more money for it when you sell it, and hopefully also net a gigabyte of free MP3's?

Surely with the number of old phones in peoples bedside draws etc, you just need to take the IMEI number from your old clunker (nokia 3200) and apply that to your nice new (and stolen) mobile.

How can the black list avoid that?