iPhone thief tracked with Find My Phone

An idiot thief busted by an iPhone? Thank you, Apple. In Pretoria, South Africa, a part-time cleaner who stole an iPhone has been tracked and arrested thanks to iCloud, and Find My Phone.

The phone’s owner, Sean Dunn, tracked the thief on his iPad, locating him to within two meters of his last known location. With iPad in hand, the thief was easily tracked, as Find My Phone displays a satellite map, with fairly accurate coordinates. The thief was found 60km from the gym where the iPhone was stolen.

The phone was stolen at 1pm, 10 January. He then blocked the iPhone via Find My Phone and blacklisted it with his telecom.

According to Dunn, “On Tuesday night my wife told me she saw I went jogging. I use the apps a lot on my phone. One is the Nike+ GPS. This comes up automatically on my phone. The thief must not have known what it was and pressed ‘yes’. What he didn’t know was that it sent a message to Facebook that I was going jogging.”

The police were at first hesitant to believe Dunn, until he demonstrated how the application worked. Dunn printed out the map of the phone’s location for the police as, “[He] didn’t want to risk [his] life for a phone.”

Dunn continued to communicate with the two policeman telephonically, updating them as to the location of the thief. Dunn said that after the arrest, he was “surrounded by policemen who wanted to see how it worked.” The thief was arrested later in the evening. Score one for Apple.