Apple Making Life Hard on Thieves

[Terry Olaes]

Non-tech savvy thieves are paying for their ignorance when they steal Apple stuff. You’ve probably heard about the Macbook used to catch its’ thief. Now we have a story about how a stolen iPhone was found using MobileMe.

Bummed, but unphased, Rob headed down to his nearest Apple Store to buy a new one. However, the next day he noticed that new contacts were starting to show up in his new phone—turns out the thief had been adding his friends to the old iPhone and the information was being synced via MobileMe to the replacement unit.

 

[Martyr]

stupid thief's making life hard on themselves

 

[Alistair Roe]

It would have been cooler to triangulate the thief's position from the network, or track an IP address, or something along those lines. But still pretty good.

 

[Virtus]

It would have been cooler to triangulate the thief's position from the network, or track an IP address, or something along those lines. But still pretty good.

How about being able to text your phone and have it secretly text its GPS coordinates back to you? I know WM phones can do it, not sure about iphones.

 

[ElGuapo242]

How about being able to text your phone and have it secretly text its GPS coordinates back to you? I know WM phones can do it, not sure about iphones.

I like that too, but how bout a GPS signal that beams their coordinates to a geosynchronous laser satellite to vaporize said thief?

 

[DeFex]

apple could have done this ages ago with ipods and itunes. but they wont.

 

[Spidey329]

I like that too, but how bout a GPS signal that beams their coordinates to a geosynchronous laser satellite to vaporize said thief?

Then the phone may fall to the ground (if it isn't also vaporized) and get damaged.

 

[Ockie]

I think its neat to get the thiefs contact information. Hopefully he's a dealer or something of that nature and you can set up his clients for busts... that dealer will wish that he never stole that phone.

 

[JohnleMVP]

There is an application for JailBroken iPhones that will run in the background and update a website with the location of your phone in custom set time intervals.