A few milliseconds was all it took.
I was standing on the street outside my hotel DM’ing with a friend - possibly even a reader of this - and a kid in a navy hoodie on a bike zooms past and grabbed my phone and was gone. It was Sunday morning, my last full day in London, I had low situational awareness because the coffee had yet to take affect and my attention was being monopolized by my screen. it was a quiet wide street. It was all too easy.
I barely noticed it happen.
I quickly raced back up to my room, and activated the lock and lost mode. Then I went back down to the lobby and had the hotel staff call the Metropolitan Police, mostly just so I could ensure I didn’t have to waste the rest of the day in a police station reporting it to get an incident number to be able to satisfy the insurance company.