A regular Monday afternoon turned out to be a roller coaster ride over in a little tech-driven country. Never in one iPad owner’s furthest imagination would he assume someone had the stomach to break into a car parked outside a graveyard.
After visiting his grandfather’s grave, proud Apple iPad owner Yaki Dayan returned to his car to find the window smashed as if Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure was hidden inside. He began to rationalize what no person would like to expect.
Credit cards can be deactivated, checkbooks can be cancelled … fine. This released Yaki’s anxiety for a short moment until he realized that his iPad, his prized possession, was gone. After calling his wife to deliver the unfortunate news, a light bulb literally turned on in his head. Find My iPad, an application used to track down the device, was the last resort to recover his beloved gadget.
Organizing his thoughts, Yaki called his daughter, instructing her to log into his MobileMe account. Shortly thereafter, she told him like a pilot in the runway ready for takeoff, “Daddy, the blue dot is active.”
The iPad was now on the map and Yaki started to track down the villains who took his [second] baby. With his daughter directing him where to go, he started to close in on the target. Simultaneously speaking with the police, they told him to come in and first file a report. He disregarded the bureaucratic advice of the cops and continued his pursuit of the iPad thieves. Ten miles later, he arrived at the destination. Find My iPad will direct you to the general area, but to the exact apartment? Maybe iPad3.
He diligently called the cops back, thinking he did his part by practically giving the thieves to the police on a silver platter. After several minutes of back-and-forth with a police force that does everything by the book, Yaki Dayan finally convinced them to meet him at the location of the stolen iPad. Sitting in his stakeout spot like Will Smith in Bad Boys, he waited patiently for back-up. Finally, a couple of cops came and they congregated next to the apartment building, trying to decide what move to make next.
Vered, Yaki’s daughter, was confident that the iPad was in one of the far apartments and activated the alarm on the iPad, a feature from Find My iPad. Yaki and his back-up heard the cry of the stolen iPad, but were not sure in which apartment it was being held captive. They began banging on the doors of two apartments in the same vicinity. The noise began to fade away and the already traumatized iPad owner began to think it’s too late. A minute later my, his daughter calls him to say, “Daddy, it’s out of the building. They must have thrown it out the window!” He rushed downstairs, full of joy and relief to find his iPad unharmed in a thick bush, the alarm still going off.
The thieves were able to get away with their demonic act, all thanks to doing things ‘by the book’; you can’t break into an apartment without a search warrant. The police did, however, ask the victimized man for an iPad demo. Justice must be taken into our own hands sometimes … especially when it comes to portable tablets and other geeky gadgets that we ‘can’t live without.’ Thanks, Find My iPad. You trumped the National Police in this sleuth case. For other cases of solving gadget theft from the user-end, check out Xbox 360 Controller Finds Stolen Xbox Console, Recover Your Stolen Gadgets with iHound and the many Anti Theft Gadgets we seen.
Source: Newsgeek; Images: Yaki Dayan
