Find My iPhone has been used hundreds of times to find stolen Apple devices, but police in San Jose found a new use for tracking app yesterday: rescuing a crash victim after her car plunged 500 feet down the side of mountain.
Melissa Vasquez was stranded for over 17 hours after her car flew off the side of Mt. Hamilton, and into a ravine, ejecting her from the vehicle in the process. Police were notified of the crash Monday afternoon, after the car’s OnStar program detected a crash, but when they turned up to the location they saw nothing.
12 hours later, Vasquez’s family reported her missing, but it took a tech savvy officer to figure out he could use her iPad to find her if only he knew her iTunes password.
Officer David Cameron asked the family if Vasquez also had an iPhone, and after a couple attempts he was able to successfully log in to her Find My iPhone account and view her location hidden down an embankment with thick shrubbery.
“I made an educated guess based on a series of common numbers people use for passwords and on the third attempt I was able to get in,” Cameron told ABC 11. “I think somebody was looking out for her. Things fell in place and had those things not fallen in place, it could have been a totally different story,” Cameron said.
Officers arrived at her location 20 minutes Cameron cracked the password. Vasquez was found lying face down and unable to call for help, though she was coherent and speaking to officers. Moments later rescuers lifted her onto a U.S. Coast Guard chopper and sent her to the ICU after suffering injuries to her legs and her abdomen.
She’s expected to make a full recovery. No word if the iPhone was as lucky.
Source: ABC11
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
13 responses to “Cop uses Find My iPhone to rescue trapped crash victim”
“Find My iPhone has been used hundreds of times to find stolen Apple devices”
Apple sells about 180 million iPhones per year. And you say that Find My iPhone has only been used hundreds of times to find stolen Apple devices?
This is a great story. But your number (hundreds) is nowhere close to being accurate.
180 million a year [are you sure about that] [what is the accurate number]?
I bet you are also a grammar nazi :)
This just goes to show you how easy it is for a stranger to get access to all your personal online info, email and exact whereabouts at any given time — just by guessing the password. Scary.
the odds of guessing password in 3 tries are in the millions. i don’t think this story is completely true not only did he have to guess her password but also her apple id ……just shows how people believe everything they read….. kaput
He may have had some assistance – asking relatives perhaps what certain birth dates were. Knowing all about my wife is how I crack all her passwords :p
I work in IT and you would not believe how easy and basic people’s passwords are in our company… i guess people use simple words/number combinations as passwords so that they won’t forget and also they are just being lazy to create complex passwords
suspicious of this story being true, odds of guessing password in 3 tries are very high, not even a computer would guess it in 3 tries
Normal people don’t use random, strong passwords. They either use basic words or personal numbers. It wouldn’t take much investigating for family or police to find eligible passwords.
Awesome she didn’t choose a harder password and really awesome the cop even THOUGHT to try this. Many people today still don’t use technology to their full advantage ad this is a great reason why you should really look into features and options your purchases may have. Many people just buy it because it’s the “latest cool thing” not having a clue of what it can actually do. Side note, I wish Apple would keep a database of iDevices reported stolen to aid in the recovery and to also compliment “Find My Phone”. There are thefts all the time in my city but if you go to the Apple Store for help they don’t maintain a database so any thief could potentially go in and get it wiped (IF i doesn’t have measures in place to prevent) and re-sell. It’s be cool if Apple could deny service on anything they see as being “stolen” or “lost” to prevent it a bit more (similar to cell phone companies who won’t touch a device reported stolen or lost and/or on contract still).
Ahh the pros and cons of two-step verification…
Many people use their birthday, the name of one of their children or even their address as passwords, or even something as stupidly simple as “1234”. If the cop discovered her password in only 3 tries, odds are that it was one of these or something easily guessable that he could have asked her parents about. As for the Apple username, it’s usually the person’s email address, so this article is completely plausible. It’s a good thing the woman had such an easily guessable password or she could have easily died of exposure.
That true. Almost all female workers in my company are using theirs child names as a passwords, sometimes combines with their birthdate. Besides many of them make a notes of them in theirs phones lol. Well… Women ;)