Unlucky Thief Caught 10 Minutes After Stealing iPhone

You’d think people would learn.

Last week, a man grabbed an iPhone out of the hands of a woman standing on a San Francisco city street, then sped off on his bicycle.

Ten minutes later, he was in custody of the police. It was his bad luck that the victim had been in the middle of testing a GPS-tracking app, and the app was running on the phone at that very moment.

She returned to the office, called the police, and was able to give them the exact location of the iPhone because the app was still running.

“This reminds me of the bank robber who arrives during the security test,” said the phone’s owner, David Kahn, in the newspaper report. Kahn is the CEO of Covia Labs, and had given the phone to another person in order to demonstrate his company’s GPS-tracking capabilities.

The would-be thief isn’t the first phone grabber to be nabbed thanks to GPS. In 2007, the town of Babylon on New York’s Long Island was able to retrieve 14 stolen city phones, thanks to GPS tracking. A company called GadgetTrak has a whole page of devices retrieved using GPS and the company’s software. Apple offers a “find my iPhone” feature with its optional, $100/year MobileMe service, and similar services are available for other GPS-enabled phones.

And don’t forget that Brian Hogan was tracked down by the authorities after allegedly taking home a prototype iPhone he found in a bar, thus kicking off one of the biggest gadget stories of the year.

For now, the odds are probably still in phone-snatchers’ favor: You have to have a GPS-capable phone, and you need to have some kind of tracking app or service turned on before you lose the phone. But over time, an increasing number of phones are going to be trackable, whether they are stolen or simply lost in the trash.

Thieves should probably start to think twice before snatching a phone out of someone’s hand.

Unluckiest thief nabs iPhone with GPS tracker (San Francisco Chronicle)

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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