The thief who stole two iPhones from the West Towne Mall (Madison, Wisc.) shopping center Apple store early Thursday morning got into his van and drove east seven miles to a gas station mini-mart. With only a suspect description, arriving police could only take a report—until an employee browsed to the Find My iPhone page of Apple’s MobileMe service. Within minutes, the employee began tracking the stolen iPhones. “The phones were showing up as blue dots on a computer screen,” Madison police said in a press release. The dots led east on Highway 12, then north on Park Street. “The officer saw the blue dots come to a rest in what appeared to be the lot of a PDQ store,” police said. The officer at the Apple store radioed colleagues, who arrived at the station to see a male pumping gas. Officers detained Jamal S. Jackson, 19, who fit the description of the thief. He was arrested based on witness identifications, and when officers searched his van, they recovered the two iPhones. [Google's Street View vehicle filled up at the station—check the view!]
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Whoa … maybe it should be renamed Find My Jail cell.
Why doesn’t EVERYTHING do this?
My wife’s iPhone 4 got stolen at a wedding and the thieves did everything correctly in order for me to not be able to track it with this software. Thieve’s are getting savvy to this kind of thing…and it is very unfortunate.
Given that every iPhone has a unique identifier that’s picked up by iTunes and (I believe), the cell network, it *shouldn’t* be possible to use a stolen iPhone for anything more than spare parts
Curious as to why that isn’t the case.
Every GSM phone is uniquely identified by its IMEI number, which the carrier will have on record and can use to block the phone. Find My iPhone allows the hardware itself to be recovered in addition, as well as remotely removing the encryption key, which renders your data inaccessible.
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