SEOUL—Food prices have risen so much that Kim Soo-yeon has developed a suspicious new habit at the grocery store. She has taken to shaking bags of her favourite brands of potato chips to see if they feel lighter.

“If companies are reducing the amount of food by unnoticeable amounts, it feels deceptive,” said the 32-year-old office worker in Seoul.

South Korean authorities will soon be backing her up in the supermarket aisles.

Seeking to temper the effects of inflation, many countries have sought to use political pressure to dissuade food makers from gouging consumers—with higher prices or lower volumes. South Korea is taking things a step further.

Starting next year, the country will require companies to disclose on their packages and websites when grocery items drop in volume, but not price. To ensure firms comply, South Korea is establishing a dedicated price-investigation team to monitor any fluctuations. Officials are considering levying fines, too.

South Korea’s muscular response to “shrinkflation” reflects how a sluggish economy—its projected full-year growth of 1.4% is roughly half that of other wealthy countries—has become a major problem for President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose approval ratings remain stuck in the mid-30s. Those unhappy with Yoon most commonly cite economic issues.

The new proposals to fight shrinkflation came as the government unveiled an initial list of violators. Following a monthlong investigation, authorities said the offerings of everything from beer to Vienna sausages to dumplings had quietly gotten smaller. Some 16 variants of flavored almonds had shrunk, too.

Choi Si-yeon, a 28-year-old office worker, said she was angry when she found out about what had happened with her favourite wasabi-flavoured almonds. Each bag contained 20 grams less, a seemingly undetectable amount.

“If they had raised the price, at least some consumers would notice,” Choi said.

The maker of the snack, a South Korean firm called HBAF, for Healthy But Awesome Flavors, said it had disclosed the product-size changes on its website. The firm pointed to the pandemic, a rise in labor costs and almond prices as factors.

Other companies also claimed to have made online disclosures or argued the slimmed-down offerings were part of flavour revamps.

Shrinkflation backlash has emerged elsewhere, too. France’s second-largest supermarket chain, Carrefour, has put up bright orange signs to highlight products it deems subject to shrinkflation since September. In the U.S., Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) recently issued a report on shrinkflation, citing facial tissues and Oreos as examples.

With costs rising, what is often lacking is transparency over potential changes, creating room for a sense of injustice when shrinkflation occurs, said Rajiv Biswas, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “Consumers can’t check the website of hundreds of products,” he said.

Headline inflation in South Korea topped out at 6.3% in July 2022 from the prior year, below the recent peaks of 9.1% in the U.S. and 11.1% in the U.K. But food prices in the East Asian country had remained relatively low for decades, so the recent upticks have triggered outsize anger. Wages haven’t kept pace with rising prices. The country’s housing market—the main source of wealth for many South Koreans—has stagnated.

A majority of South Koreans plan to spend less money next year, according to a recent poll, with nearly half of respondents citing inflation as the chief reason.

Low inflation had been a particular policy priority for South Korea over the decades, helping the country’s export-heavy economy maintain a good environment for private investment, said Randall Jones, a former senior official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who led the group’s economic reports on South Korea.

“People aren’t used to inflation in South Korea,” said Jones, who is now a distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

South Korea is conducting daily price checks for more than two dozen staple items such as milk and ramen noodles. The country’s antitrust regulator will list any shrinkflation examples on a newly created website and will handle enforcement of the new measures. The government wants to ink agreements with large South Korean retailers to build a joint monitoring system for some 10,000 everyday items.

That sliced cheese and other inexpensive items were among the first named shrinkflation violators irks people like Lee Hyun-woo, a 23-year-old university student. “If even processed food is shrinking, I feel betrayed,” Lee said.

In recent weeks, the country’s shrinkflation suspicions have touched everything from the cubed white radish accompanying Korean fried chicken to the cream density of a slice of strawberry cake.

Kim Young-hee, a 42-year-old homemaker, is glad about more government transparency. But the extra knowledge likely won’t change her habits, such as her occasional purchase of honey-butter almonds for her children.

“I’ll still buy the almonds,” Kim said, “but I don’t want to be tricked.”

A new kind of present is gaining acceptance this holiday season. More consumers are picking secondhand items to gift each other, finding it to be an environmentally and budget-friendly option.

Thrift stores that sell used clothes and goods are springing up online and on street corners. Goodwill Industries International, the nonprofit behind the familiar chain of thrift stores, is ramping up its online efforts. Fashion brands are developing their own resale offering to keep up with clothing-reseller sites such as Depop and Poshmark. Roughly 17% of gifts this holiday season will be a resold item, according to software firm Salesforce.

“Consumers are choosing resale first because of the incredible value, the unique merchandise, and the incredible sustainability benefit,” said Matt Kaness, chief executive of GoodwillFinds, the nonprofit’s online e-commerce platform run in partnership with Salesforce.

Secondhand clothes, once seen as frumpy and embarrassing, are now keenly sought out by the fashion conscious. A popular vintage aesthetic dovetails with consumer calls for goods that do less harm to the world. About 85% of American shoppers have bought or sold preowned items over the past year, nearly a third for the first time, according to online marketplace OfferUp’s Recommerce report. In apparel alone, some 10% of the global market will be secondhand by next year.

GoodwillFinds is the only major nonprofit player in resale.

GoodwillFinds’ online platform allows a smarter operation than the traditional bricks-and-mortar store, said Kaness, formerly an executive with retailers including Walmart and Urban Outfitters. The platform uses artificial intelligence and large data sets to more accurately price and categorise items, creating a much more efficient system, Kaness said.

“In a store, it’s a human looking at the item. They have paper sticker tickets for the price and they have to process such a volume that it is somewhat random,” he said. In contrast, the company’s online system uses computer vision to take a picture, identify the item, create a listing and price it.

Moving online is the logical choice for secondhand sellers, said 25-year-old Brooke Bowlin, who runs lifestyle blog Nuance Required. “Secondhand stores just can’t sell enough,” said Bowlin, who started her own thrift store in Siloam Springs, Ark. “By moving online and expanding the audience, there is an opportunity to re-home more clothes,” she said.

Major fashion brands are also increasingly recognising that secondhand is as much a necessity as it is an opportunity. The fashion industry is responsible for up to 8% of global emissions, relying on resource-intensive raw materials and fast-moving trends that have contributed large amounts of waste. Around 11.3 million tons of textile waste go to landfills in the U.S. every year, according to environmental organisation Earth.Org.

Outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia established its Worn Wear platform in 2017, one of the first resale channels by a major brand.

As much as adapting to trends, Patagonia Worn Wear aims to change consumer behavior, said Asha Agrawal, managing director of the Patagonia venture fund that runs the platform.

“A lot of our messaging is around—‘you don’t need to buy something new,’” she said.

Worn Wear buys back used brand gear from consumers by paying higher prices than peer-to-peer apps or other marketplaces, Agrawal said. This strategy contributes to the bulk of the platform’s costs but also boosted its inventory fourfold this year alone, she said, adding Worn Wear has been profitable for the last two years.

Worn Wear is now integrated into the Patagonia brand. “You can now do your main shopping with Patagonia with our resale business in the U.S.,” she said. “That’s a huge evolution for us.”

Resale by brands and third parties is expected to outpace traditional thrift sales and donations in the U.S., rising to 60% of a $70 billion total by 2027 from 15% of the $20 billion secondhand market in 2017, according to online thrift store ThredUp’s recent resale report.

Other fashion players have their versions. Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz launched H&M Pre-Loved in the U.S. this year, in partnership with ThredUp. Inditex-owned Zara has launched a preowned platform that offers repair services, customer-to-customer sales and donations of used garments in the U.K. and France, with plans for a U.S. rollout by 2025.

Resale remains an imperative for fashion brands as a way to control distribution and retain the trust of shoppers increasingly alert to the fate of their old clothes. However, scaling up resale generates a raft of operational challenges such as authentication, returns and ensuring that secondhand doesn’t look like an afterthought, said Anita Balchandani, fashion lead at consultant firm McKinsey & Co.

Unlike nonprofits, such as Goodwill, that get their inventory from donations and don’t have to be accountable to shareholders, retailers are struggling to make business sense of resales, Balchandani said.

“No one has proven the path to scaling this up profitably,” she said. “You almost have to create a whole new end-to-end supply chain…. The retailer who cracks that journey is going to make a real difference in this space.”

RUSH CITY, Minn.—Before the guards let you through the barbed-wire fences and steel doors at this Minnesota Correctional Facility, you have to leave your phone in a locker. Not a total inconvenience when you’re there to visit a prolific iPhone thief.

I wasn’t worried that Aaron Johnson would steal my iPhone, though. I came to find out how he’d steal it.

“I’m already serving time. I just feel like I should try to be on the other end of things and try to help people,” Johnson, 26 years old, told me in an interview we filmed inside the high-security prison where he’s expected to spend the next several years.

For the past year, my colleague Nicole Nguyen and I have investigated a nationwide spate of thefts, where thieves watch iPhone owners tap their passcodes, then steal their targets’ phones—and upend their financial and digital lives.

Johnson, along with a crew of others, operated in Minneapolis for at least a year during 2021 and 2022. In and around bars at night, he would befriend young people, slyly learn their passcodes and take their phones. Using that code, he’d lock victims out of their Apple accounts and loot thousands of dollars from their bank apps. Finally, he’d sell the phones themselves.

It was an elaborate, opportunistic scheme that exploited the Apple ecosystem and targeted trusting iPhone owners who figured a stolen phone was just a stolen phone.

Last week, Apple announced Stolen Device Protection, a feature that likely will protect against these passcode-assisted crimes.

Yet even when you install the software, due in iOS 17.3, there will be loopholes. The biggest loophole? Us. By hearing how Johnson did what he did, we can learn how to better secure the devices that hold so much of our lives.

How he got started

Johnson isn’t a sophisticated cybercriminal. He said he got his start pickpocketing on the streets of Minneapolis. “I was homeless,” he said. “Started having kids and needed money. I couldn’t really find a job. So that’s just what I did.”

Soon he realised the phones he was nabbing could be worth a lot more—if only he had a way to get inside them. Johnson said no one taught him the passcode trick, he just stayed up late one night fiddling with a phone and figured out how to use the passcode to unlock a bounty of protected services.

“That passcode is the devil,” he said. “It could be God sometimes—or it could be the devil.”

According to the Minneapolis Police Department’s arrest warrant, Johnson and the other 11 members of the enterprise allegedly accumulated nearly $300,000. According to him, it was likely more.

“I had a rush for large amounts at a time,” he said. “I just got too carried away.”

In March, Johnson, who had prior robbery and theft convictions, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to 94 months. He told the judge he was sorry for what he did.

How he did it

Here’s how the nightly operation would go down, according to interviews with Johnson, law-enforcement officials and some of the victims:

Pinpoint the victim. Dimly lit and full of people, bars became his ideal location. College-age men became his ideal target. “They’re already drunk and don’t know what’s going on for real,” Johnson said. Women, he said, tended to be more guarded and alert to suspicious behaviour.

Get the passcode. Friendly and energetic, that’s how victims described Johnson. Some told me he approached them offering drugs. Others said Johnson would tell them he was a rapper and wanted to add them on Snapchat. After talking for a bit, they would hand over the phone to Johnson, thinking he’d just input his info and hand it right back.

“I say, ‘Hey, your phone is locked. What’s the passcode?’ They say, ‘2-3-4-5-6,’ or something. And then I just remember it,” Johnson described. Sometimes he would record people typing their passcodes.

Once the phone was in his hand, he’d leave with it or pass it to someone else in the crew.

Lock them out—fast. Within minutes of taking the iPhones, Johnson was in the Settings menu, changing the Apple ID password. He’d then use the new password to turn off Find My iPhone so victims couldn’t log in on some other phone or computer to remotely locate—and even erase—the stolen device.

Johnson was changing passwords fast—“faster than you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” he said. “You gotta beat the mice to the cheese.”

Take the money. Johnson said he would then enrol his face in Face ID because “when you got your face on there, you got the key to everything.” The biometric authentication gave Johnson quick access to passwords saved in iCloud Keychain.

Savings, checking, cryptocurrency apps—he was looking to transfer large sums of money out. And if he had trouble getting into those money apps, he’d look for extra information, such as Social Security numbers, in the Notes and Photos apps.

By the morning, he’d have the money transferred. That’s when he’d head to stores to buy stuff using Apple Pay. He’d also use the stolen Apple devices to buy more Apple devices, most often $1,200 iPad Pro models, to sell for cash.

Sell the phones. Finally, he’d erase the phone and sell it to Zhongshuang “Brandon” Su who, according to his arrest warrant, sold them overseas.

While Johnson did steal some Android phones, he went after iPhones because of their higher resale value. At bars, he’d scope out the scene—looking for iPhone Pro models with their telltale trio of cameras. He said Pro Max with a terabyte of storage could get him $900. Su also bought Johnson’s purchased iPads.

Su pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property and was sentenced to 120 days at an adult corrections facility in Hennepin County, Minn. Neither Su nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.

On a good weekend, Johnson said, he was selling up to 30 iPhones and iPads to Su and making around $20,000—not including money he’d taken from victims’ bank apps, Apple Pay and more.

How you can prevent it

A week after my trip to Minnesota, Apple announced Stolen Device Protection. The security setting will likely foil most of Johnson’s tricks, but it won’t be turned on automatically.

If you don’t turn it on, you’re as vulnerable as ever. Switching it on adds a line of defence to your phone when away from familiar locations such as home or work.

To change the Apple ID password, a thief would need Face ID or Touch ID biometric scans—that is, your face or your finger. The passcode alone won’t work. And the process has a built-in hourlong delay, followed by another biometric scan. This same slow process is also required for adding a new Face ID and disabling Find my iPhone.

Some functions, such as accessing saved passwords in iCloud Keychain or erasing the iPhone, are available without the delay but still require Face ID or Touch ID.

A criminal might still be motivated to kidnap a person with lots of money, then slowly break through these layers of security. However, the protections will likely dissuade thieves who just want to grab phones and flee the scene.

So what loopholes remain? A thief who gets the passcode could still buy things with Apple Pay. And any app that isn’t protected by an additional password or PIN—like your email, Venmo, PayPal and more—is also vulnerable.

That’s why you should also:

• Add a distinct passcode to money apps, like Venmo and Cash App.
• Delete any notes or photos that include personal information such as passwords or Social Security numbers. Store that stuff in a secure note inside a third-party password manager, such as Dashlane or 1Password.
• Create a stronger iPhone passcode—one that uses letters and numbers.

The most obvious is Johnson’s advice: Watch your surroundings and don’t give your passcode out.

If this crime has taught us anything, it’s that a single device now contains access to our entire lives—our memories, our money and more. It’s on us to protect them.

—Nicole Nguyen contributed to this article.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return 14 sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand, removing from its collection all Khmer-era artworks associated with an art dealer accused of selling antiquities illegally.

The Met said Friday it will temporarily display a selection of the 16 sculptures while arrangements are made for their repatriation. The works were made between the ninth and 14th centuries in the Angkorian period, the museum said. The Khmer empire ruled much of what is now Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam from about 802 to 1431.

The sculptures are associated with art dealer Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which said he orchestrated a multiyear scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiquities on the international art market. The indictment was dropped after Latchford’s death in 2020. Authorities later secured a $12 million civil forfeiture against his estate for stolen Southeast Asian antiquities they alleged Latchford had sold.

The Met said it cooperated with authorities in the U.S. and Cambodia following Latchford’s indictment and received information that made it clear the sculptures should be returned.

“The Met is pleased to enter into this agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office, and greatly values our open dialogue with Cambodia and Thailand,” said Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement Latchford was believed to have run “a vast antiquities trafficking network,” an allegation Latchford had denied. He urged cultural institutions and private collectors to remain vigilant about antiquity trafficking.

Many countries and cultures that were colonised have for decades asked institutions to return stolen artefacts. That effort has gained more traction in recent years, with many museums now openly acknowledging that some items in collections were gained through colonial exploitation and looting.

The Cambodian government in recent years has asked the Met and other museums to return artworks taken from their countries of origin under murky circumstances.

In 2013, the Met returned two 10th-century Cambodian stone statues, known as the “Kneeling Attendants,” which were also associated with Latchford. The statues were from the Koh Ker temple in the same province as the Angkor Wat temples. Officials said they believe they were stolen from the temple in the 1970s. The Met had acquired the statues from donors between 1987 and 1992, it said at the time.

One of the most high-profile repatriation efforts involves the Benin Bronzes, West African artefacts stolen more than a century ago from what is now Nigeria.

Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 artefacts were pillaged from the Kingdom of Benin by British soldiers in the late-19th century as the U.K. expanded its colonial empire in West Africa.

Many of the Benin Bronzes—a name used to cover a variety of artwork, including carved elephant tusks, brass plaques, and wooden heads—wound up in private collections and museums in Europe and the U.S. The Met returned three artefacts to Nigeria in 2021.