After having his iPhone 4 literally stolen from his hand in a snatch-and-grab in San Francisco, Cabel Sasser was delighted to have it phone home two weeks later through Find My iPhone.
There was just one problem. The iPhone 4 was now 7,830 miles away. Here are the pictures, along with Cabel’s priceless reaction.
[via Twitter]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
45 responses to “Stolen iPhone 4 Phones Home Two Weeks Later From Almost 8,000 Miles Away”
Did he get it back by starting a blog or is it a hopeless cause now?
LOL
LOL! Should they send in the army to extract that?
it’s one thing to know where it is…
So now he has this information, what does he do?
Send him a nice message and remote wipe it. Not much more you can do when it is that far away.
I’m not sure if this is possible, but if it were, I would simply wait a few weeks for the new “owner” to install a lot of apps and music or whatever and THEN wipe the phone with a little message telling them the phone is stolen and will not function until returned to the REAL owner. I would then continue to do so every few days until I lost contact with the phone. Just to ensure who ever has it realizes they have a phone they will NEVER get any use from.
I would, of course, send them the info on where to return the STOLEN phone with a little notice that they were being reported to their local police. A little bit of work with Google translate to send the message in the local language would also be a part of my plot. I would genuinely make an effort to report the incident to the police of the region by email which shouldn’t be too hard. I’d even send the info of where the phone was as well.
Teach whoever to not steal if even in a small, and arguably petty, way. After that kind of investment I’m a little tenacious and sometimes mean.
He might as well kiss that iPhone goodbye. Nobody is going into that country to retrieve it. The owner might wind up as fish bait, a multiple organ donor or sold into the sex trade like nearly all their children are. That’s a no-man’s land for anyone less than a skilled assassin or military ops personnel.
How do you say “give me my F-ing iPhone back you Muther F-er!” In Vietnamese !? LOL
LOL… damn pity… i think he should report to Ministry of foreign affairs. :p
Pho-geddaboutit.
Clearly someone that has never been to the country and have any first hand knowledge about it.
I would just send spam after spam to it in find my iphone messages. Setup a auto copy and paste line of code or sumthin of it and something to keep tapping enter on my keyboard until i got that bitch back…hahaha MooooJOjoJO
I would just send spam after spam to it in find my iphone messages. Setup a auto copy and paste line of code or sumthin of it and something to keep tapping enter on my keyboard until i got that bitch back…hahaha MooooJOjoJO
lol send message: Remote wipe time :) …User: “Not Again, NOOOOOOO!!!”
well he’s lucky he at least gets to see what street his beloved phone is on. If it has been stolen and brought to Israel, then findmyiphone would just have given you terrain! Although googlemaps works perfectly with street addresses, the findmyphone doesn’t!
Call Rambo.
if he had sprung for a few dollars for the “device locator” app on the app store he could have had the phone ring an alarm and take a picture of the thief as he touches the screenÂ
 device locator is the way to go ! (much more accurate tracking )
Why would he have his iPhone stolen? You mean, “After his iPhone was stolen….”
hmmm..how did he managed to track it? Anyways did he get his phone back?
The person who has the phone in Vietnam most probably does not have an Apple account, certainly has not registered the phone to a different Apple ID, and will not be downloading and installing app as he does not have the owners password.
The phone has been sold and gone overseas, could have been virtually any Asian country such as India, Thailand and so on. The phone cannot be blocked using the IMIE number in such countries.
The owners best hope is to wipe the data and forget it.
You forget that after you wipe the phone it removes Find My iPhone…. so you only have one opportunity to wipe it.
Locking it with various passwords on the other hand…. *devious laugh*
Once you resotre an iphone thorugh mobile,e it cam only be done once amd to getall these apps he needs to restore so again nfo tracking
that would be “Hãy cho tôi tr? l?i iphone c?a tôi b?n motherfu**er!”