Their whole theoretical plan, assuming the part about the phone taking pictures of its surroundings and uploading them without the user noticing actually works, still sounds like nonsense to me, because there is likely to be little connection between the types of criminals who hack phones and the ones who break into houses and steal things.
If you are the type to break into houses and steal things, then you are probably focused on a relatively small geographical area - you need a connection to the type of criminals who can actually move your stolen property, which is the sort of thing that only really works in person. You probably have little interest in hacking phones like this because such a scheme would generate data for places all over the world, 99% of which are completely impractical for you to exploit.
If you are the type to hack phones and computers, then the only way for your work to be practical is if you have a way to turn your hacks into money remotely, without ever actually travelling to the place where the hackee is, since each one is probably not worth anywhere near the cost of travelling there. Only by combining a lot of them without ever actually travelling anywhere can you make money.
Getting these two types of criminals together doesn't seem very practical - how does a hacker get in touch with a break-in man in a city far away? How could they come to trust each other enough to actually pull a directed robbery? Any break-in man would probably think he was either being screwed with by someone trying to get him to pay money for nonsense info, or being set up for an ambush by police or some other group of criminals. And any hacker would probably also think he was being set up in some way by police or some other criminal group. And you'd have to establish a lot of these relationships for the whole scheme to start to make any sense. Yeah, it's not happening. Let hackers stick to stealing credit card info and bank account login info, and let break-in men stick to conventional, local methods of figuring out who is worth the effort of robbing.