A man has been arrested after using a plug socket on a London Overground train to charge his smartphone.

45-year-old artist Robin Lee plugged his iPhone into the power socket on a train on Friday, July 10 as he was travelling from Hackney Wick to Camden Road.

He was arrested as he got off the train at Camden Road after a police community support officer said he was taking electricity illegally.

"She said I'm abstracting electricity," Mr Lee told the Evening Standard.

"She kept saying it's a crime,” he added, saying that when he got off the train there were already a number of police officers on the platform.

"She called to them and said 'This guy's been abstracting electricity, he needs to be arrested'."

Mr Lee, originally from Hull, East Yorks, told Mirror

"I said 'if it's a crime you need to arrest me and if it's not you need to let me go'," he said.

"I wasn't struggling, I wasn't raising my voice. I told them to make a decision while four of them were in my face."

Mr Lee said he then tried to push past the officers, but was handcuffed and put into a van and taken to the British Transport Police base in Islington - where he was de-arrested.

Mr Lee described the episode as “ridiculous”, saying “they should never have arrested me”.

"Abstracting electricity is something you charge cannabis growers with when they use electricity from a source other than their own home,"
Mr Lee told Mirror Online.

"I just plugged my iPhone in for 5 minutes on the train."

The British Transport Police said that they were called to a report of "a man becoming aggressive when challenged by a police community support officer about his use of a plug socket on board an Overground train".

“Shortly after 3.30pm, a 45-year-old man from Islington was arrested on suspicion of abstracting electricity, for which he was de-arrested shortly after.

“He was further arrested for unacceptable behaviour and has been reported for this offence.”

So plugging in an iPhone on the train is an offence?

Yes, technically you could be charged (no pun intended) for ‘abstracting electricity’. This means consuming electricity without proper authorisation.

At the more severe end of the scale it’s about bypassing an electricity meter after being cut off, but it can also apply to using electricity from a battery in a torch or from plugging your phone into a socket without permission.

Of course it depends on what kind of socket you are plugging into - if it’s a socket placed obviously by a table on a train, you are invited to use it by the train company. But if you seek out the plug usually only used by cleaners to plug in vacuum cleaners you could be in trouble.

A TfL spokeswoman said that the plugs in question have signs near them saying they are for “cleaners only” and not for public use - although Lee says that there wasn't one on the socket he used.

Mirror Online asked Lee whether he'd be charging his phone on the train again.

"As much as possible. Every time I get on the train it's the first thing I’ll look at doing now," he said.

Here's are some tips and tricks for making your smartphone battery last longer. Alternatively you could pick up one of these battery-charging power bars.