It was like taking candy from a baby—or an iPhone 17 Pro from a drunk Pierrot.

Bushwick karaoke bar Seventh Heaven (4 Irving Ave.)—FKA Heaven or Las Vegas—appears to be the latest in a long line of Brooklyn venues targeted by phone thieves, with more than a half-dozen phones allegedly swiped from patrons over the last Halloween weekend.

The dimly-lit anime-inspired watering hole was hosting an all-night karaoke party during the reported theft operation, which took place about 2:50 a.m. on Nov. 1. Within 10 minutes of arriving, one victim reported “me and at least 6 other girls also had their phones missing at around the same time,” according to a Reddit post made later that day.

A 25-year-old man filed a report with the NYPD claiming he, too, was robbed of his device at the venue in the wee hours of Nov. 1, police said. The incident is still under investigation and no arrests have been made so far.

“All the stolen phones were immediately shut off and untrackable,” per the Reddit post, noting her phone’s location last updated just after 3 a.m. at Cypress and Flushing Avenues.

“None of us were able to find our phones back.”

“Figured something had to have been happening as they started denying re-entry the rest of the night around 3:05ish and patting people down who left,” wrote another user in the same thread.

“Deadass saw a good chunk of the people stepping out, even some with big ass bags, not getting searched. but of course all the femmes in our group were stopped and searched and patted down.”

A request for comment from Seventh Heaven, regarding the thefts, and if security protocols will be updated in the future, wasn’t immediately returned.

But Seventh Heaven wasn’t the only Brooklyn bar that reported thefts on Halloween.

Good Judy, a gay bar in Park Slope, saw one phone swipe just before midnight on Saturday, the NYPD said. The phone’s location was last updated in New Jersey before shutting off.

Pickpockets targeting Brooklyn bars is nothing new. Similar thefts have been reported in Bushwick at Carousel (36 Wyckoff Ave.) and The Sampler (234 Starr St.), per reports going back to 2024.

And while citywide major crimes are largely down, in Bushwick’s 83rd precinct, grand larcenies—like phone thefts—are up, with 148 grand larcenies reported in the second quarter of 2025, compared to 181 during the same period this year.

Mass phone snatchings have also been reported at larger venues in Brooklyn, like the Brooklyn Monarch (23 Meadow St.), Brooklyn Paramount, Warsaw, Under the K Bridge and now-shuttered Brooklyn Storehouse.

Previous reporting has tied the large phone-sweep operations to lucrative resale markets in China. Few cases, even if reported to the NYPD, are ever solved, given limited resources to investigate low-level crimes.

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Nicole Rosenthal is a Brooklyn-based investigative reporter. You can reach them at nicole.rosenthal1@gmail.com, @bynrosenthal on X or @nrosenthal.03 on Signal.

Top photo by Andrew Karpan.