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AirTag stalking in the UK: what the police figures show

NewsPublished 4 min read
An empty car interior at dusk photographed from the passenger footwell with a torch beam across the carpet

There is a version of the AirTag stalking story that gets shared every few months with no numbers attached, and a version with numbers that almost nobody reads properly. In February 2026 The Independent published police data that deserves the second treatment. The stance taken here is that the figures are real, serious and worth acting on, and that the most useful thing an iPhone owner can do about them is learn what their own phone already does.

What the data actually said

Freedom of information responses from police forces in England and Wales, obtained by The Independent and reported by Holly Evans in February 2026, showed stalking reports involving tracking devices rising from 57 cases in 2018 to 568 by the end of 2024. That is an increase of 896 per cent.

Coercive control cases involving the same devices went from 38 to 431 across the identical period, a rise of 1,034 per cent.

Two caveats belong in the same breath as those percentages, and the reporting carried both. Only 18 of the 44 forces asked supplied figures, so the national totals are higher than the published ones by an unknown margin. And the counts lump together coin-sized Bluetooth tags and dedicated GPS trackers, which are very different products with very different capabilities.

Why the two device types should not be counted together

A Bluetooth tag has no radio of its own beyond a short-range beacon. It cannot phone home. Its position is only ever known because other people's phones happened to pass it and reported an encrypted sighting, and the platform that relays those sightings is built to shout about a tag travelling with a stranger.

A GPS tracker is a different machine. It has its own satellite receiver and its own mobile data connection, it reports on a schedule chosen by whoever placed it, and nothing in an iPhone is designed to detect it. Many of them are marketed for vehicles and sold with magnetic cases.

Lumping them into one statistic is understandable when a crime report is being filed at speed. It is much less helpful when a survivor is trying to work out what to search for, because the search is completely different in each case.

What people working on this are saying

The response from the organisations closest to it has been consistent for two years. ITV News reported in April 2024 that trackers had become a "weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers" as cases climbed 317 per cent, and the later data extends the same line.

Charities quoted in the 2026 reporting described a postcode lottery in how frontline officers respond, with some survivors rehoused and others told very little. Deputy Chief Constable Sarah Poolman, the national policing lead for stalking and harassment, acknowledged the gap directly:

Whilst forces have made progress, there is more to do to ensure consistency across the country.

Neither the reporting nor this article suggests the devices caused the behaviour. Coercive control predates every one of these products. What has changed is the cost and the convenience of surveillance, and that is exactly the kind of change a policy response has to catch up with.

What an iPhone owner should actually do

The practical steps are short, and worth knowing before you need them.

  1. Leave the alerts switched on. A certified tag moving with you that is not registered to your Apple Account will raise a notification on your iPhone. That behaviour is on by default and turning it off helps nobody.
  2. Act on the alert rather than dismissing it. Tapping through gives you the option to make the tag play a sound so you can find where it is.
  3. Search physically for a GPS unit, because no phone will find one. Wheel arches, boot linings, the underside of a pushchair.
  4. Report it, and keep the device. Police forces treat a recovered tracker as evidence; destroying it removes the record of who registered it.
  5. Get specialist help. Refuge, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and the Cyber Helpline all deal with technology-enabled abuse specifically.

If you want the underlying privacy model rather than the procedure, we have written about how location reports are encrypted.

How Orbit Tag helps

There is no version of this subject where a tracker company should be pitching, so the only honest thing to say about Orbit Tag here is what it is and what it is subject to.

It is a certified accessory. That is not a badge, it is what puts the tracker inside Apple's own safety and privacy machinery rather than outside it, which means the unwanted-tracking alerts described above apply to this product exactly as they apply to Apple's. Location reports are encrypted by Apple and legible to the registered Apple Account alone, so nobody working at this shop can look one up either.

The rest is ordinary hardware for ordinary losses: a speaker between 80 and 100 dB for ringing within Bluetooth reach, the relay network past it, an IP67 case 9 mm deep with a moulded ring hole, and a coin cell changed by hand every couple of years. The entry bar is iOS 14.5 on Apple hardware; Android owners cannot use it, and there is no ultra-wideband radio.

Two tags a box, under £15, free postage. read the specification.

Sources

By the team at iOS Tracker Revised

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