On a vacation with his wife and kids recently, Paul Deas opened his suitcase and found a rude surprise: his MacBook had been stolen. Not only that, but the thief had helpfully left him a note inside, telling him exactly who had robbed him: TSA Agent 5414.
Late last year, Cult of Mac reported that New York City’s crime rate had increased for the first time in twenty years, not due to the resurgence of criminal gangs like the Warriors and the Baseball Furies, but because the iPhone was just such a popular thing to steal.
Why are criminals so interested in ripping off iPhones, though, and not, say, Samsung Galaxy S III’s? What it all comes down to is two things. One, the predictability of the resale market: you can predict what you can pawn an iPhone for, but other gadgets are harder. Two: an iPhone or iPad is easy to identify at a glance, where as other lucrative gadgets are harder to spot.
Any chemical that can dissuade a bear from using your ribs like emory boards is potent stuff, which is why this story of an Apple Store robbery up in Vancouver is so horrifying: three perps busted up a Genius Bar and started indiscriminately spraying people with bear mace.
Don’t ever say that the people who work in the Apple Store aren’t actually geniuses. Apple Store employees in the Altamonte Mall in Seminole County, Florida managed to sleuth out a couple of identity thieves who were trying to buy iPhones with stolen IDs.
How’d these Sherlocks do it? They were tipped off by several subtle clues on the IDs themselves, including the fact that they were not made of the correct material, and featured a comical number of misspellings that could only be worse if they wrote down the name of the state as “Flrodia.”
Apple’s Find My iPhone led San Francisco police on a 90MPH car chase last night which ultimately led to the arrest of three suspected armed robbers.
My normally sleepy neighborhood in San Francisco has been plagued recently with a string of violent and scary armed street robberies.
For the last week or so, a gang of violent perps have been robbing people of gadgets like their iPhones at gunpoint. But last night, an iPhone hit them back.
You should never steal an iPhone while wearing pink shoes. It doesn’t sound like a piece of vital information, but in the hard streets of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park it is, because those pink little things are going to get you caught.
One thief learned that lesson the hard way, after he stole an iPhone from a girl, and then the iPhone he stole was stolen, and then both of them got busted. It’s a crazy story, but it goes something like this:
Although New York has traditionally been viewed as crime-ridden since the seediest days of the 1970s, the crime rate has actually been sinking for the last twenty years. No longer, however, and it looks like the desirability of Apple products are indirectly to blame.
An airport worker accused of being an accomplice in a recent robbery at JFK airport that resulted in over $1.5 million worth of iPad minis being stolen has been arrested.
$1.5 million worth of iPad minis were stolen on Monday night from New York’s JFK airport, and if that wasn’t enough, it all happened in the same cargo building that was the site of the Lufthansa heist featured in Martin Scorcese’s famous 1987 gangster flick, Goodfellas.
Remember that Chinesee teen last year who sold his kidney for an iPad 2? He wasn’t the only one: earlier this year, another Chinese teen named Wang swapped his kidney for an iPhone and iPad. Now the butchers who operated on him are in court, awaiting their verdicts.
Everyone wants the latest hot Apple product, even gangs of masked thieves carrying deadly assault rifles.
Sasser, co-founder of Panic software, has had a fantastic idea to make stealing iPhones pretty useless. Most savvy thieves know that when you find or steal a smartphone, you shut it down immediately. This stops it being tracked by the carrier and – in the case of the iPhone – it stops the user from tracking it, or wiping it from afar.
Cabel’s incredibly simple idea would stop this from happening.
We can all surmise that urinating upon your Mac will not be covered by your AppleCare, but here’s an interesting question: if you stand up right this second, unzip your fly and hose off all over your MacBook, can you even pay Apple to service the machines?
The answer is no, because Apple looks at micturated-upon MacBooks as a biohazard. Along with an obnoxious 11-year-old’s full bladder, the obscure fact above is what ended up costing a Pennsylvanian school district upwards of thirty-six thousand dollars to replace a cart full of thoroughly soaked MacBooks.
If you’ve ever taken apart an Apple device, you know what delicate work it can be.
Imagine trying to extract incriminating child pornography photos from a laptop and you’ll understand why tools that help you see what’s on the device before opening it up are increasingly important in law enforcement.
You think your users are hard to please? Try cops, says Travis Taniguchi.
He’s a police criminologist for the Redlands Police Department in California, and one of the driving forces behind an iPhone and iPad app-friendly police department. Cops are not only skeptical, but armed.
“You want to talk hostile customers or end users? You don’t get more hostile than a cop,” Taniguchi joked.”They do that lean back thing, then they put a hand on their gun. It’s not easy.”
As the only “suit” on an Appnation Enterprise Summit panel about upstarts – he was gently ribbed by other panelists about not following the casual jeans-and-blazer mandate – he gave some interesting insights about how police departments can implement mobile apps.
Florida – When Salvatore Miglino went to pick up his son at his former mother-in-law’s house for a court-appointed visit, he figured there would be trouble.
So he started filming secretly with his iPhone, which may have turned out to be a lifesaver. Cheryl Hepner, his 66-year-old ex mother-in-law, went ballistic and pumped three shots into him before her .22 caliber Beretta pistol jammed.
You want to buy an iPad for Christmas. The problem: scammers know it too and are waiting in prey for you this holiday season. Here are some tips on how to safely shop for tablets online without falling victim to hoax high-tech Santas.
An new police app takes the game of cops and robbers to a different level: concerned citizens – plus hooligans, miscreants and various and sundry – in Surrey, U.K. can now see where the police are.
Walmart is starting to look like a prime place to nick an iPad.
Recently, a pair of crooks successfully pulled a bait and switch by returning an empty box — now there seems to be a gang targeting Walmarts for iPad thefts with an even simpler ruse.
“I just bought this iPad, but I’d like to return it.” OK, the Walmart clerk must have thought.
Duh. Who would buy an iPad, then return it a few minutes later?
Developed by a crime victim, a new app called ThugsMug promises to snap pics of perps while misdeeds are in progress to provide evidence.
Launched July 24, the $4.99 app bills itself as “World’s First Safety Protection App for iPhone & iPad 2.” That’s not strictly true, we’ve alerted you to a number of ICE (in case of emergency) apps like Silent Bodyguard which equips users with a panic button.
This may be the first one, though, that activates your camera to capture evidence at regular intervals.
The developer suggests you activate ThugsMug in potentially dangerous situations, putting it in “armed” mode when at ATM machines, parking lots, bus stops, subways, train stations and malls, or while on vacation or walking or jogging alone.
Should danger strike, by hitting “active,” the app sends email messages with pictures to your designated emergency contacts. It can be set to take pictures every 10 seconds, with flash if your device supports it. The app will also alert 911, too.
The person who developed it was victim of a motorcycle jacking incident, which ended up in a crash and violent beating. There were witnesses, but no one was ever caught.
The developer, who remains nameless in the account, says:
“Reflecting back, I wish I could have captured a picture of them the moment I jumped up from the crash. I had immediately grabbed my phone from my back pocket and had it in my hand when I was assaulted however, my phone did nothing more than block a few blows. Even if they had taken my phone and destroyed it, the pictures would have already been automatically sent to my emergency contact.”
Do you think these emergency apps are useful?
Well, that’s one way to end an argument about last month’s AT&T bill. A New York man has apparently been arrested after trying to ram his girlfriend’s iPhone down her throat.
A rogue TSA Agent who stole more than $50,000 worth of property has been fired and arrested after he was caught trying to shove an iPad down his pants.
iPhone apps are live streaming the trial of a mother accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter.
Casey Anthony, 25, is standing trial in Orange County, Florida on a charge of first-degree murder. Her 2-year-old daughter Caylee’s disappearance in the summer of 2008 became a national obsession.
Remember the three Foxconn employees arrested back in December for leaking the design of the iPad 2 to third-party case makers? They’ve been found guilty, and they’re going to prison.
