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One family, two Find My iPhone adventures
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian family has recently gone through not one, but two adventures related to stolen iPhones. While on holiday at a Hilton in Fiji, the family's mother, Fiona Donohoe, had her iPhone ripped off by a hotel concierge. In a move worthy of a featured spot on Dumb Criminals, the theft was discovered and the iPhone recovered after the concierge accidentally synced all of his/her own contacts with Donohoe's MobileMe account. After that it was presumably simple to track down the thief, who has been fired from the Fiji Hilton and jailed for six months. Only two weeks later, 13-year-old Tahira Donohoe had her iPhone stolen while at school. She and her father used the Find My iPhone app on his iPad to track the thief's progress along a bus route for a while before deciding to give up the chase and let the police deal with it. They walked into a police station, set the iPad on the counter, and reported a theft in progress. Police caught up with the thief shortly thereafter, and when they were at first unable to find the stolen goods, they asked the Donohoes to ping the phone using Find My iPhone. Once the telltale sonar sound went off, police recovered the phone, arrested the 13-year-old thief after a brief chase, and brought everything in to the station to sort things out. The Donohoes did not press charges against the young thief. The Herald reports that the Donohoes had already replaced the iPhone stolen in Fiji before that phone was recovered, so they now have an extra iPhone. Hopefully they can hang on to all of them from now on. Find My iPhone is available for free from the App Store and does not require a paid MobileMe account if you have an iPhone 4, any iPad, or a fourth-generation iPod touch. Once iCloud launches, the service will presumably be free for all users on all devices. Find My iPhone is hands-down the first app that should be installed on new iOS devices and the first service you should enable.
Game thieves caught after reselling games next door
We have a special place in our heart for stupid gadget criminals over here at Engadget, not so much because we pity their lack of intelligence, but due to the consistent comic relief they tend to provide us and our audience; regular readers of this site will probably remember such dim-witted individuals as the laptop thief who got busted for contacting customer support, the gentleman who snatched a handset from a gathering of cellphone experts, and of course, the clueless teenagers who were caught trying to extort a ransom for the iPod they had just stolen. Well the latest in this series of tragi-comic tales comes to us from Berryville, Arkansas, where two young men had made a habit of stealing videogames from the local Wal-mart by stuffing them down their pants. They probably thought that they were pretty clever by removing the games from their cases so as to discard the ever-present security tags, but what turned out to be their downfall was the fact that they would immediately sell the stolen discs to a GameStop location -- one that was located right next door to the Wal-mart! It didn't take long for the ace sleuths in the 'mart's loss prevention department to make the GameStop connection, after which the two braniacs were quickly identified by police detectives perusing the stores' security footage. Oh, how we love stupid criminals: we keep getting older and (arguably) wiser, but they stay just as stupid.[Via Joystiq]
Stupid kids try to steal David Copperfield's cellphone
Not necessarily mobile news as such, we still thought you'd get a kick out of this tale of four teenage thugs, two lovely assistants, and a man who earns his living by making stuff disappear. After Sunday's show at the Kravis Center in alm Beach, Florida, illusionist David Copperfield and his female assistants were walking back to their tour bus when they were approached by a small pack of kids. Instead of requesting the world-famous magician's autograph (don't laugh, we have one), the three 17-year-olds and one 18-year-old proceeded to rob the women of their purses at gunpoint, making off with several hundred dollars and a RAZR. When it came time to jack Copperfield, however, the teens were apparently dumbfounded by his special powers, as he managed to conceal his own wallet and cellphone while appearing to completely empty his pockets in a trick he referred to as "reverse pickpocketing." Eventually all four morons were picked up in their stolen car after Copperfield took note of the license plate, and their cache of loot from the night's activities was returned to its rightful owners.[Via mopocket and textually]
