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I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartmen

• ahepp 3y ago
  What city do you live in?
  • layer8 3y ago
    From his company, probably Winona, Minnesota.
• chrischen 3y ago
  Wasn’t expecting that. Was expecting an “even if you located them the cops won’t bother to help you recover just $XX dollars worth of stolen goods.
  • eru 3y ago
    I think that attitude really depends on where you are, and how overworked your local police is.
    • megablast 3y ago
      And the police you get. And when in the shift they are.
  • eiiot 3y ago
    San Francisco
  • gosub100 3y ago
    You're surprised real-world accounts dont match common internet stereotypes?
    • chrischen 3y ago
      Granted I was in SF, this was also my first hand account.
• bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. >The officer went back and said “listen, we know they are in your apartment, we can hear them, either go get them or we are getting a search warrant.” The guy said “ohhhh well I did have a party last week and there’s this backpack…” >Uh huh. Headphones returned. I mean from your description sounds like the guy was telling the truth, or is your theory that he stole your airpods, went on vacation and came back home after several weeks - which of course is also a possibility, but I think backpack left over from party sounds also reasonable. on edit: hmm, early in the morning, so now I understand it was a week after being stolen they showed up on Find My..guess need more coffee.
  • ant6n 3y ago
    Or perhaps resist the „well actually“-urge ;-)
    • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      As you do? I think my point still holds, guy lives in range of Find My, Find My notices it a week later - ah ha this guy definitely stole it? Seems a logical disconnect.
      • dihrbtk 3y ago
        you don't need to be "in range" for Find My to work, all it takes is someone with an Apple device to be nearby
  • semireg 3y ago
    I didn’t want to muddy the original story, but I had nest cam footage of the actual theft but too blurry to make a positive ID. I saved the footage. The guy was very tall and built like a football player. With sandals. When I met the guy that night a week later he opened the door and it was pretty obvious he was the guy. Same sandals. Beyond a reasonable doubt? Eh, probably not.
• baz00 3y ago
  Lucky there. UK here. A couple of years back I had a macbook pro delivered to me. It was delivered to the correct number on a different road. The POD had a photo of the front door and the person. I recognised the front door as it was on a local estate. Phoned delivery company up (DPD) and they said that they delivered it to the correct location and wouldn't do anything about it. Went round there and the guy said "um, it's mine now. Finders keepers. What are you going to do about it?". So I phoned the police. They never turned up. I opened up a credit card chargeback. But I was complaining about this to someone in the school playground and someone else overheard it. Turns out she was his next door neighbour. Said "I'll get it back for you". Sure enough that afternoon she turned up with it! Turns out the guy was a convicted paedophile and she knew that and said if he didn't give it back she'd tell everyone on the estate. You need leverage or a good police force against criminals. The latter is rare so I suspect that taking matters in to your own hands is sometimes required.
  • timwis 3y ago
    Hey just so you’re aware for the future, it’s the seller’s responsibility to get your item delivered to you, so if you hadn’t recovered it, it would be on Apple to resolve it. They would then take it up with the shipping company. More detail: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-wrong-with-a-purchase/if-something-you-ordered-hasnt-been-delivered/ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
  • hinkley 3y ago
    You did a cryptographically secure deletion of that hard drive, right? Even odds there were bad things in that drive.
    • baz00 3y ago
      It was still sealed. It was probably on Facebook marketplace.
  • gadders 3y ago
    This is like an episode of Shameless. Sounds a lot like when I grew up. Except we didn't have macbooks or online shopping.
• p00dles 3y ago
  I had a similar situation in Paris with an iPhone. The Police were so helpful, knew exactly what to do, and were also very excited, but ultimately the Find My location wasn’t granular enough to find the phone. In an urban environment like Paris with big apartment buildings directly adjacent to each other, I think Find My is difficult. I’d have to be lucky and catch the phone during transit from one place to another, I think. Edit: being able to use my iPad with Find My was an amazing experience, it’s almost worth having one just for that situation, where I didn’t have to bumble around with 2FA and logging in from my laptop, which isn’t Apple. I could also erase my stolen phone remotely, which gave me so much peace of mind.
  • weinzierl 3y ago
    "but ultimately the Find My location wasn’t granular enough to find the phone" Depends on the generation, the new ones with ultra wideband (UWB) are really awesome, you can locate the item to tens of centimeters. I think you already have to be in a certain range for UWB to kick in. So might not really help if you could not identify the apartment otherwise.
    • gorbypark 3y ago
      The only real "problem" with UWB is the range. It might work better in North American homes (with hollow drywall walls), but in my Spanish home with brick interior walls, UWB doesn't even work one room over. It'll say "nearby", but completely lack any sort of direction information unless in the same room. I'd suspect in a situation like the OP was in in Paris, it would be very difficult to distinguish and exact location using UWB unless you got really lucky (like the phone was being stored directly next to an exterior door or something).
  • dghughes 3y ago
    There should be an app people can download and you share the location data of your lost device. Multiple devices can all home in on it increasing resolution of the location via triangulation.
• radres 3y ago
  Really would like to know which city this is. As others commented many of the police force would've responded "tough luck"
  • semireg 3y ago
    Small town Minnesota, USA
• api 3y ago
  Lots of high theft products should come with a stink bomb mode that sprays some disgusting sulfur based compound.
• enb 3y ago
  How close did you have to be to the window for it to say “nearby”? With my airtags you have to be within several metres.
  • semireg 3y ago
    I was standing in the grass of apartment complex. Find My app says “distant” and I move phone over window “nearby” … back and forth it would toggle between distant and nearby. Open and shut case, Watson.
• joshstrange 3y ago
  Did you go buy a bunch of lottery tickets afterwards? Cops doing their job when you give them the entire breadcrumb trail is incredibly rare. I have many stories from friends and that I’ve seen online of the cops refusing to do anything even when you can guide them directly to the location of your stolen property. I’ve personally experienced their lack of competency when they refused to follow up on stalking/harassment of a friend. They said there was nothing they could do even after I’d tracked down what free texting service was being used and gave them the abuse email address for law enforcement to use. They just straight up refused to do anything. Finally I was able to get my friend’s number blacklisted from the free text message service’s side to stop the abuse (the scumbag would change phone numbers every time he was blocked so we couldn’t just block the number). We even knew who was behind it and they wouldn’t do anything. And before you think this was mild he was sending 100’s of texts a day and calling multiple times. He also keyed the victim’s car but again, cops wouldn’t do anything about it.
  • piperswe 3y ago
    It depends on where you are. I had a stolen backpack recovered when I was travelling in Zurich. I stopped by the train station police, showed them the AirTag tracking, and they sped down the freeway (lights & sirens!) to catch up to the perpetrators' train and arrest them. I went to the Landesmuseum, and by the time I was done my backpack (and most of its contents) were ready for me at the police station. Compared to SFPD, who took about 8 hours to even show up to my burgled apartment so I could file an insurance report, it was a breath of fresh air.
  • eloisant 3y ago
    TBH having a few police officers drive to the place then spend that time probably costs more than the price of the device.
    • gwright 3y ago
      Are you suggesting that police services should operate like a service for hire? It isn't clear to me if you think the victim should hire the police to investigate (and thus decide if their price is lower than re-purchasing the item) or if you think the police are only expected to investigate based on the value of the item. In either case it doesn't sound like a sound way to operate a police department. It seems like a good way to incentivize vigilantism though.
• meetingthrower 3y ago
  Ok we have opposite situation than stolen headphones. We found some on a trail in the woods. They are "Alan's Airpods". We connected to them from our nearby house, hoping he would come by using Find My. There is no other way to contact them that I can see?
  • aembleton 3y ago
    You could take them to a police station and hand them in.
    • sushid 3y ago
      You might as well as gift it directly to the police officer's kid if you're going to do that.
• xkekjrktllss 3y ago
  Where are you located? Here in a busy midwest city, the police are too short staffed to even respond to a 3 car pile up in the middle of a busy intersection sooner than 2 hours after the fact.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  Opposite anecdote. I had my phone stolen from the gym. I showed up with the police and the guy denied having it - ended up he was telling the truth. Then I saw the phone was at someone else’s house right by the one I showed up to the following evening. I used public records to track down the owner and he said it was a rental. He called his tenants and they said they didn’t have it. They were also telling the truth. Once I told them where it was stolen they said that another neighbor actually worked at the gym. He did have my iPhone and returned it once his manager told him to. I worked at the gym part time as a fitness instructor. This was back in the iPhone 4 days admittedly when Find My relied on GPS.
• fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Quite a few years ago (and fortunately the only time I've been burgled), I had a guy hop in through my bathroom window of the house, because our rubbish bins were outside the window/we left the window open for the cats to jump in & out of. My flatmates and I were all sound asleep in our rooms. I remember half-waking a few times and seeing a shadowy figure in my room, but being half-asleep remember thinking "ah just my flatmate probably doing something" and went back to sleep. Awoke a short time later and realised what had happened with the charging cables for my laptop/phone pulled towards the doorway and a few things strewn here and there. Got up and went to the hallway and found the rest of the house in disarray and banged on my flatmates doors to panic/get them to call the police. This was at about 4am. They hadn't hit up my flatmates rooms, only mine (closest to the front door/road) and the main areas of the house. While the police were on their way, I realised my desktop was still there (it was a full-tower) and turned it on to see if I could locate the phone: success! It showed my phone as being in a carpark near a Macca's a few areas over. My flatmate was still on the phone to the police so we relayed that and they said they'd take a look, but a separate team was coming to see if we were okay. That second team arrived and we made 'em some tea and all sat around being reassured by 'em until the first team had reported in; they got the stuff back! (Well, most of it). Turns out the guy had: stolen a car, burgled about a half dozen places before ours, then burgled our place and driven to get get Macca's to celebrate. Apparently he was the only car in the carpark and the police walked up seeing that the car was chock full of people's stuff. My stuff was returned and so was the car and the police were apparently trying to get the other stuff back to their owners, too. I got a follow up call a couple months later "we can't tell you who he is, but for your information he'd already been pulled up on this before and this time he's going to prison". There's nothing quite like the feeling of justice, like "yeah FUCK you for entering my house and taking my stuff". The scariest thing of the entire scenario was me realising that my phone/laptop were charging on my bed, next to me. Which meant he'd leant over me while I slept to take my stuff. After moving to the UK, unfortunately after a few years with getting away with walking around London at night, I got mugged. These guys clearly did this stuff all the time because my phone had clearly been turned off, so was not able to be located. But it really shows the importance of technology helping mitigate/prevent these sorts of things; we should really be holding companies to higher standards and have universal ways to make theft of anything like phones/laptops essentially impossible. Another thing was the reaction of NZ police; fast, efficient, caring and really eager to just help out someone who had been wronged. Whereas the response I got in London/Met police was basically "ya we can't do anything and there's no CCTV of it" (the most surveilled city in all of Europe, apparently.