Comment by helloguillecl
1 day ago
Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
But also the thief and his accomplice.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
Similar story for me. Except in Rome, and the ending wasn't happy because all I could do is watch my wife's iPhone go to Tunisia where it disappeared.
Still, in those very early days of "Find my" I could see how this was going to eventually change things.
Simlar (sad) story in Spain, very recent. Airtags and Find My are known by police by now. When my friends bag was stolen, he located it on the police station via Find My. It was located in a residential multi-story house nearby, which was known by the police. The place is known to house several members of organized petty crime. Police told him they cannot do anything as they can't enter the house without a warrant and won't get one just based on his testimony.
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I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
In certain places in America. My county sheriff's office would be more than happy to have something to do that isn't picking up somebody's stray dog. I'm sure this is true for the UK and Canada too.
I called the non-emergency line for the local police department when someone went home with my wallet after I left it on a plane, tracked with an AirTag. 2 hours later an officer said they didn't have probable cause but could knock on the door and ask anyway. I think he basically offered for there to be no trouble if they gave it back, thief claimed they were "going to return it to lost and found", and sure enough I was able to go show my passport at the station and collect it the next day.
>I'm sure this is true for the UK
No, it isn't. The police in the UK are stretched extremely thin.
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UK police is more interested in combating wrong thought
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That's not a common occurrence, police in Switzerland is highly passive, and the judiciary system is highly complicit with criminals (drug dealers,thieves, white collar crimes etc), and against women (rape victims can be told to close their legs better by judges).
Care to back up your outlandish claims? I live here for 15 years and all you write is completely untrue for everything I ever experienced, saw, heard or read. Or you mean some case from early 70s?
Saying "i am getting my gun and going to retrieve my stuff" guarantees that 6-8 police cars will converge on the location within minutes. Once there, they will apprehend the thief since they are there already.
Then you’re fucking comically unlucky, there’s a shooting and some old enemy offs someone at the same address and flee, minutes before the police gets there.
Some pissed off riff-raff family member decides that you look like the killer.
You’d better have a top notch lawyer in your family or prepare to spend lots of money hiring one.
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I love getting diverted from the violent domestic call to turn up to a theoretical firearms call and find out it was just someone trying to be clever.
Sounds like a great way to get charged with making false statements to the police or something along those lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements
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I don't think this is true. It's probably true that there's a pervasive belief that a hungry person probably shouldn't be punished for stealing food.
Other kinds of property crime? The costs of enforcement are high compared to the losses caused by individual cases, prioritization is understandably a difficult problem to solve.
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My experience with small police departments in the US is that they either don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with small property claims. If you’re a business they’ll be there in 10 minutes, but individuals aren’t afforded the same courtesy. Eventually, citizens realize it’s just not worth the cost or the hassle to report a crime unless it helps with an insurance claim.
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I believe there to be some merit to the notion that it is better for society if many of the generational cycles which lead to crime are broken. Sometimes that involves off-ramps from the road to incarceration.
That said, the policy can be, and certainly is, applied in imbalanced ways when justice is pursued over pragmatism.
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That belief is not shared by law enforcement. But all the same, they'll refuse to help you anyway.
Bullshit.
I wish I had this in the early 2000s. The theft of my carry-on bags flying with Alitalia turned out to be an organized crime ring of flight attendants and ground crew. They didn’t get caught until 2013, the whole rotten lot. Never flown with Alitalia since then.
Thankfully you were in Switzerland rather than the states, I just never see American police caring about that.
My friend/colleague had her phone stolen while she was napping in the hospital room of her terminally ill husband. Fortunately it had MDM. Called Palo Alto PD, I sat with them and tracked it from the hotel and it was already in San Jose. They worked with SJPD live and walked them into the guy who happened to be in a parking garage peering into cars. Caught him with a backpack full of stolen phones.
The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.
Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.
Oh yeah, justice in the free and best country in the world. Prisons are hell on earth, so after his release, he will murder first person on sight and he will be back in no time.
So smart.
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Switzerland is the Singapore of Europe (I mean this in a good way!) - the state just functions in a way that other European countries can only dream of
I spent a couple of years in Lausanne so am aware. Swiss police don't mess around, you need to follow the rules if you want to live there.
Can confirm. Things just work in Switzerland. It’s a tough change to live/go back elsewhere.
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> the state just functions in a way that other European countries can only dream of affording being able to
I have fixed that for you.
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I was robbed at a gas station in Jersey City and the police retrieved the airtagged backpack in 20 minutes. The police was fantastic.
Depends on the jurisdiction.
One time I was driving down a twoo-lane road with a police car a few hundred feet behind me. An oncoming pickup truck veered several feet over the center line and almost hit me. I flagged the police down to tell them and they were nonplussed even though they literally saw it happen. Drunk driving, a greater threat than property theft, was of little consequence to them.
On the other side of the country my motorcycle got stolen and the police found it the next day. I picked it up from the tow yard shortly thereafter.
YMMV.
America is weirdly nonplussed by destruction and deaths caused by a car.
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My car got broken into in Oakland, California. Multiple pieces of luggage stolen (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place). Luckily I had an AirTag that showed the exact location of the stolen items. I called the police but they said they couldn't do anything. Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in. Regardless, I was put on a waiting list, they finally called me back 3 days later. I promptly left the state a few months later.
It's not your fault for leaving your property in your car. Wild to say that.
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>the thief would have to invite them in
it wasn't your mistake calling them, but be thankful you escaped: those police were apparently vampires.
I'm sure if you were to "take your gun" to where the AirTag is located, the police would care a ton more.
I generally believe it is not a crime victim's fault for being a victim of a crime, and the police services need to stop saying things that perpetrate this mindset.
> (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place).
It's not your fault. It's California's fault for tolerating a culture of criminality.
>Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in.
I mean, isn't that good? 4th amendment, warrants from a judge, and all that.
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Unrelated to airtags but last year a couple wheels were stolen off my brand new car. My city in California falls under county sheriff jurisdiction and they actually assigned a detective to the case.
Sadly even once he got the subpoena and other paperwork to track down the criminals through Facebook (they had listed my wheels two weeks later on Marketplace) he couldn't find them since they were using VPNs.
The police in Spain will also not care, in my experience. They acted completely helpless regardless of how much information I gave them.
My solution now is to travel very light.
Didn't they start chirping and alert the thief?
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
That only happens after 24 hours and only if the tag has been continuously traveling with an iPhone present.
Same story in Bulgaria. A backpack with an iPhone and an iPad was stolen from a car. Had to go to the police department to file a written complaint. Weeks after that the devices were still visible in FindMy but police could not identify and catch the thieves.
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
Funny story: I actually forgot my backpack in the train at Zurich HB and it went to Basel and back again to Zurich HB, where I was able to get from the train. All the while I was nervously looking at Find My, seeing it travel and just hoping it wouldn’t be stolen.
I do use airtags for this purpose. I also expect (and I read) that most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports.
> most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports
Its sort of a combination of two reasons.
First in many cities, police departments are underfunded. And so running around looking for your stolen phone or whatever minor item is low on their to-do list compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.
Second, for minor thefts most insurance companies just need a quick box-tick "police crime report number" before paying out. So if the police know they can get you off their backs just by quickly giving you a report number, well....
> compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shoting their brains out
I'm guessing people have that impression from TV, but it doesn't seem to match reality.
> the data suggests that officers spend relatively little time responding to major violent crimes: 4%, 3.7% and 4.1% in the three locations, respectively.
- https://www.freethink.com/society/how-police-spend-their-tim...
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>stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.
Thats a good thing tho, its the problem(s) solving themselves.
And it's probably under your deductible anyway. And replacing various cards is your deal with your credit card etc. companies. Relatively few of us carry around a lot of cash.
I also know from experience that Zurich police will chase an AirTag location with vigor.
That sounds... unique from everything I've heard.
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Switzerland sends in swat for noise complaints, they would definitely care about a thief that could be caught.
Is it all over or just some parts of the countries? I ask, amused, since I have never been there except a 2 day trip to Geneva in 1992 or so.
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My local police would literally laugh at me if I made that call.
Reminds me of a Big Lebowski scene. That is surprising because it is an easy win for them. They would be all after it.
I have recollection of french police using civilian appearance to collect a bike thief in a meetup between him and the bike's original owner presenting himself as a buyer.
Leads ?!
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That's awesome. I'm glad that trackers have reached a price point, reliability and form factors that I can easily put one in everything I care about. I even have card ones in my wallet, my steam deck / e-reader case, etc.
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
Given that the battery in my Airtag lasts about a year, I'd rather have to exchange a CR2032 once per year than to buy a new tracker whenever the built-in rechargeable battery inevitably dies. (I think there are actually rechargeable CR2032s too – best of both worlds?)
There are, and I got cursed with a BMW that uses one of them. Eventually after 10+ years it finally dies, and it's basically impossible to replace and actually make it work again, so I just have to replace the 2032 in it every few months.
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> I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was. Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
When I lived in London, I once came across a criminal operation that was producing fake documents, in what looked like substantial quantities. British & foreign driving licences, National Insurance cards, passports, ID cards etc. Not especially high-quality, but still.
Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)
In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)
I had a camera stolen on a Zürich streetcar and when I reported it to the police they acted like it was the first crime that had ever been reported in the canton, a very serious matter indeed.
yeah this should be the standard, same here in Australia unfortunately the police will just pretend to care by taking more information and then does nothing.
Did you tell them that you have a particular set of… tags?
haha do that in the States and the police will tell you to go F yourself.
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Racist
People steal due to economic issues, not their ethnicity.
Africa has economic issues.