People Keep Coming To This Home Looking For Lost Phones

Megalith

Megalith

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Since no one can figure out why, I am willing to bet that it is aliens.

It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.
 
Sucks for that couple. Before I read the article, I was going to guess maybe a glitch in triangulation keeps locating devices at the same place. The article basically speculates something similar.
 
Article says there is no obvious connection between the phones. Different models and OS's.

They should put a wall of pictures on the door of people who have come looking for the phone. Then new comers will see their fate.
 
the problem with those trackers is they are not that accurate unless the real power sucking gps is turned on and typically nobody leaves it on. i would be willing to bet it is a house near by or the storm drain near the house being used as a dumping ground.
 
Very strange, once is understandable but this many?

Lunas said:
the problem with those trackers is they are not that accurate unless the real power sucking gps is turned on and typically nobody leaves it on. i would be willing to bet it is a house near by or the storm drain near the house being used as a dumping ground.
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This makes alot on sense, probs a house near by, and having turned GPS while going past this house a number of times.
 
Bet if they started suing the carriers for harassment something would get done.

That would really suck, especially the amount it happens and for them to be suspects in kidnapping and other crimes.

Given the story talked about another person this happen to I wonder how often this type of thing happens.
 
jj14 said:
Very strange, once is understandable but this many?



This makes alot on sense, probs a house near by, and having turned GPS while going past this house a number of times.
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The thing that kills me is the equipment to narrow down where exactly the phones are exists and is even small enough to be mounted on a drone or in a car all they need is a cell booster with a directional antenna have a squad car drive around until they find the strongest signal then move in there is obviously enough stolen phones that the police got involved... alternately i think they could use 2 small cell boosters to triangulate the position too... I know verizon and att both have mobile stations setup that can do just that.
 
Be even better if there was a giant bucket of phone in the basement. Each week they turn a few of them on for 5 minutes and back off.
 
Or is it possible it's a phone stealing syndicate who are spoofing their GPS coordinates? And just happened to have randomly picked this couples location.
 
Where there's smoke, there's usually fire. These people are probably stealing phones. I'm surprised the police haven't gotten a warrant.
 
Terpfen said:
Wifi GPS triangulation is not a carrier function. It's a phone/OS function.
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Start with the carriers to get them to put pressure on the phone makers. That said you are assuming they are using wifi and not cell towers. If your computer can't get on the internet the first place to start is are you connected to wifi or a fixed network connection. You don't jump to the backhaul. In this case you start with the carrier to see how they are giving people this info. And work your way down.

Cmdrmonkey said:
Where there's smoke, there's usually fire. These people are probably stealing phones. I'm surprised the police haven't gotten a warrant.
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Guess you skipped the part where they were forced out of their house for a few hours while they searched for a body. Pretty sure they would have found the pile of phones when looking for a dead body and one phone.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Where there's smoke, there's usually fire. These people are probably stealing phones. I'm surprised the police haven't gotten a warrant.
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"In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl."

So, no, that's not it. Also, I just don't see that they would be asking the FCC and their senator for help and going to the media to bring so much attention on themselves if they were stealing phones. That doesn't pass the sanity check.
 
Too bad the location couldn't be changed. Put it someplace like the Governer of the state's house and see how fast it would be fixed then.
 
I wonder if anyone has done a test and searched for a phone that IS at that location? It would be hilarious if the test search showed the phone as being in the Las Vegas house.

Are there any statistics on the number of times the location searches are close vs the number of times they are totally wrong?
 
One of my favorite places is off the west coast of Africa. It's when lat/long is 0/0. If I had funding, I would have an island built on that spot. Imagine all of the traffic I could get (although not sure how you actually get to my island).

Sucks to be these people. Companies don't care unless it hurts their bottom line.
 
We had a company add GPS tracking for our mobile devices (bulky Motorola MC67 winCE based)
anyway , when reception was bad , it would always default to report to a specific city, and one that you wouldn't want to go to as its like a one way trip , at first we thought they were stolen and transferred there.

I`m guessing something similar is going on here.
 
steakman1971 said:
One of my favorite places is off the west coast of Africa. It's when lat/long is 0/0. If I had funding, I would have an island built on that spot. Imagine all of the traffic I could get (although not sure how you actually get to my island).

Sucks to be these people. Companies don't care unless it hurts their bottom line.
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There is an island there. It's called "Null Island" and is a massive 11 sq ft. Lol.
 
Obviously they are using a program to feed incorrect location data to the phone. Those phones are usually reset completely using stolen manufacturer tools from China and given a new imei and sold in other countries by street vendors.
 
Yep GPS systems are great. The one installed in my car, 2010, tried to get me to turn right off of an elevated highway, I80 in Alameda. It had the Sacramento Expo Center on the wrong side of the street and in Hayward it wanted me to drive down one way streets. The new one, 2015, seems to work OK. Powered by MS.
 
Exavior said:
Start with the carriers to get them to put pressure on the phone makers. That said you are assuming they are using wifi and not cell towers.
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I didn't assume anything. I correctly outlined the function of a specific technology, wifi triangulation. Wifi triangulation is when the phone uses geolocation and signal strength of nearby wifi signals to determine its relative location on the globe. This was the iPhone's sole method of determining location for a couple of years, before Apple could fit the GPS chip on the iPhone's PCB. If you've ever used location services on an iPhone and seen a circle over an area instead of the white and blue dot, that's wifi triangulation at work.

That you are ignorant of this makes you really unreliable as a source of a solution.
 
Terpfen said:
I didn't assume anything. I correctly outlined the function of a specific technology, wifi triangulation. Wifi triangulation is when the phone uses geolocation and signal strength of nearby wifi signals to determine its relative location on the globe. This was the iPhone's sole method of determining location for a couple of years, before Apple could fit the GPS chip on the iPhone's PCB. If you've ever used location services on an iPhone and seen a circle over an area instead of the white and blue dot, that's wifi triangulation at work.

That you are ignorant of this makes you really unreliable as a source of a solution.
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That is one method of multiple used which you are even admitting in your post. Thus if others are possible and you state 100% of the time that wifi triangulation is used and GPS and tower triangulation are never used something doesn't add up. Do you agree that it is not used 100% of the time but in some cases you do get other methods used? Or are you saying that the only method ever used by any company to determine the location of a phone has been wifi triangulation and only ever will be?
 
Exavior said:
That is one method of multiple used which you are even admitting in your post. Thus if others are possible and you state 100% of the time that wifi triangulation is used and GPS and tower triangulation are never used something doesn't add up. Do you agree that it is not used 100% of the time but in some cases you do get other methods used? Or are you saying that the only method ever used by any company to determine the location of a phone has been wifi triangulation and only ever will be?
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That's actually a good question.
 
Usually the simplest answer is the correct answer - they are actually stealing phones.
 
I checked and saw how they clash in their photograph, which leads me to believe they are hands working with aliens of the illegal type.
 
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