The way this article is framed sounds like bullshit to me. 18.1 was released less than 2 weeks ago. Any phone running this version of iOS would have had to already been in custody and somehow upgraded to this version, or otherwise brought into custody very recently—too recently for this to have already posed such a problem that law enforcement is “freaking out” and reporting it to the media.
A non-insignificant amount of people have been running the public betas because of Apple intelligence, RCS / iMessage toys, UI customization, etc. For example, MixPanel reported about 2% of the iOS install base running 18.0 before 18.0’s launch. IMHO, that’s pretty crazy for a beta OS.
Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.