Naples Metro's "phantom" thief steals an elderly woman's phone and ends up in handcuffs. 

Naples – Beneath the frescoed vaults of Municipio station, amid the throngs of commuters and tourists enchanted by the beauty of the underground, a 24-year-old Romanian man thought he could vanish like a shadow with a cell phone in his pocket.

But the watchful eye of the Railway Police turned a quick theft into a lightning-fast arrest: it's yet another blow to the serial pickpocketing that plagues Line 1 of the Naples metro, where train thefts increased 15% in the first nine months of 2025 compared to the previous year, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior's Criminal Analysis Service.

It was Saturday afternoon, around 17 pm, when the Line 1 train headed for Piscinola stopped at the Municipio, a key hub with over 20 passengers a day.

His investigative instincts, honed by years of patrolling crowded trains, don't fail him: a few moments later, taking advantage of the crush at the restart—that daily chaos of elbows and shoulders—the suspect grabs the phone from the trembling hand of a 72-year-old woman from the Rione Sanità district.

The thief, a 24-year-old with a criminal record for petty property crimes, attempts to flee towards the escalator, but the police are one step ahead: they stop him in the crowd, recovering his cell phone intact from the inside pocket of his jacket.

The arrested man, identified as Ion P., born in Romania but resident in Naples for five years, was taken to the Police Headquarters for questioning. The investigation, coordinated by the prosecutor on duty, revealed that the young man often works in tandem with unidentified accomplices, targeting medium-value devices to resell on the black market in historic city centers.