6 Times When AirTags Turned The Tide On Thieves

When AirTags first came out, they didn't quite receive the attention Apple was hoping for with its first foray into the object tracking segment. The coin-sized Airtags were designed to work by piggyback off Apple's extensive Find My network built atop hundreds of millions of device in active usage across the world. In its early days concerns about the abuse potential were flagged, and it didn't take long before the first string of reports detailing AirTags stalking popped up online.

In response, Apple made a handful of changes targeted at reducing the abuse potential of its object tracker. Recently, following the rollout of the iOS 17.5 update, the company partnered with Google to work on an industry standard that would drop the OS ecosystem barriers for detecting Bluetooth trackers. The idea is that tracking works across Android as well as Apple smartphones, which is particularly important when one takes into consideration scenarios like stalking.

Experts have also proposed their own independent solutions, with the most recent one coming from a team at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Diego. As Apple continues to fill the security gaps, users have also found ways to use the AirTags to catch bad actors, and in many cases, helped law enforcement authorities nab them. Following is a list of some notable incidents where AirTags were used to turn the tide on miscreants.

A woman from Santa Barbara County, who was fed up with thieves stealing mail packages, mailed herself a bundle with AirTags inside to nab the bad actors. According to a report by The Los Angeles Times, after having items repeatedly stolen from her post office box, the woman put a bundle with the intention of tracking down the brigand. The culprits took the bait, and the woman eventually tracked the package near a location on East Sunrise Drive in Santa Maria.

After locking in the location of her AirTag package, the woman informed the Santa Barbara County sheriff's deputies. The authorities soon landed at the spot where the AirTags had flagged the location of the stolen package. In addition to the decoy package, they also found a bunch of other items that were likely taken away from other mailboxes.

Later, the officers arrested two people and booked them over "suspicion of possession of checks with intent to commit fraud, fictitious checks, identity theft, credit card theft, and conspiracy." The authorities praised the ingenious approach of tracking down the bad actors instead of taking the law into their own hands, and also announced that they were looking into similar cases of mail burglary.

In another report from The Los Angeles Times, law enforcement officials in Santa Barbara County were quoted as saying that AirTags were being used to track items like wallets, purses, electric scooters, e-bikes.

The theft of luggage from airports has become a problem across the world. There are plenty of first-person accounts of stolen luggage from airports on social media, never to be seen again. In cases, the victims have fought back, with a little help from Apple's tracker. Late last year, a family vacationing in the North Carolina mountains realized multiple suitcases were stolen after being unable to spot them at the baggage claim.

Thankfully, Catherine Gavino had put an AirTag into one of the missing suitcases, after getting the idea from videos she saw on social media. "I watched a YouTube video Friday morning and threw it in the luggage," Gavino was quoted as saying by the Queen City News. When she started tracking the AirTag on her phone, it was headed towards Gastonia.

After an initial attempt to find the missing items failed, her family decided to try again and managed to lock the location to a house in Gastonia that was just about 20 minutes from their current location. After alerting the Gastonia Police Department, the family was able to recover their suitcase, alongside that of another victim, however, the contents were missing.

Unfortunately, the technique doesn't always work. In 2023, NBC Bay Area reported that a San Jose man, returning from Alaska, found his luggage stolen from the carousel. While he was able to track and retrieve the AirTag, most of his belongings were already gone.

This one is a peculiar case, one where an AirTag was planted on a bike as a test, but eventually allowed the owner to find and confront the thief who stole it. Mikael Sundvisson, a Swedish man, placed an AirTag in the headlight of a bike to see if it could really help track or even recover a lost item. Sundvisson parked his bike at an open spot, but it was stolen at some point in the night, and the next day, its location ping put it at a spot three kilometers away from its original location.

After reaching the location, Sundvisson saw the bike with another person and confronted them. After he mentioned that the bike belonged to him, the person claimed it was given to them by a friend for repair work. Thankfully, there was no ugly confrontation, and the person, expressing shock over the alleged stolen status of the bike, handed it over to its owner.

The person in possession of the bike had no idea how Sundvisson tracked down his bike, and couldn't even make sense of the beep alert coming from the AirTag's speaker. Notably, in his video, Sundvisson mentioned that he was not sure if the person he recovered the bike from was the one who stole it, but even if he was the culprit, he felt sorry for them.

In May 2024, Market Watch research revealed that California recorded the highest number of car theft incidents of any state in the country. Between January and July of the preceding year, a staggering 99,769 motor vehicle thefts were reported, accounting for a whopping one-fifth of the net national tally. The track record for recovery isn't particularly encouraging but with a bit of tenacity and deployment of tech, some victims have been able to retrieve their stolen vehicles.

Long Beach resident Philip Obando, had his car stolen right outside his home. Thankfully, he had an AirTag inside the trunk of his car. As soon as he realized the car had been swiped away, he contacted the local police department and tracked the car to a location merely a few blocks away, soon finding it parked at a gas station. Alongside his wife, Obando confronted the man, and as soon as he used the key fob, the thief ran away.

Narrating his account to NBC, Obando mentioned that the thief left drug-related items in the vehicle. After going through the dashcam footage, Obando witnessed the thief driving around his neighborhood alleyways, treating the stolen ride to a car wash, and switching license plates to avoid tracking by law enforcement. Notably, the wallet abandoned by the thief during their escape revealed that he was actually Obando's neighbor. The local police officials, however, recommended that one should avoid personally confronting anyone involved with the theft.

Luggage theft from airports is not exactly a novel trend, but the incidents have been rising at an alarming pace. Indonesia recently ordered the deployment of more personnel at the Bali airport to curb the rise in luggage theft, while authorities in Spain accused airport officials of item theft worth around $2 million late last year leading to multiple arrests, as reported by The Telegraph. In a few cases, AirTags have proved to be of remarkable utility for officials, even if the stolen items are not always recovered.

In one such case from Florida, a flyer who missed her luggage at the airport eventually tracked it some 11 miles away from the airport. Unfortunately, the victim's luggage had items worth around $1,600 disappear that were never recovered. However, following the victim's report and the attached location coordinates — and after cross-referencing it with a later incident that involved missing jewelry valued at approximately $15,000 — police officers eventually arrested a 19-year-old airline subcontractor who admitted to the thefts.

The paraphernalia from the second theft was recovered, and the culprit was eventually charged with two counts of grand theft, reports ABC7 News. However, it's worth noting that AirTags are not foolproof. If a thief decides to rummage through a stolen luggage and finds an AirTag — or any object tracker for that matter — they can simply get rid of it to disable the tracking. Moreover, as this Florida case suggests, there's no certainty that items stolen with a package will be found intact.

Late in November 2024, the Newport Beach Police investigators nabbed a suspect who allegedly made off with items valued at roughly $8,000 worth of stolen goods. Surprisingly, it wasn't jewelry, electronics, or bikes that were missing this time around. "The suspect hauled off trees, plants, decorative pots and even pumpkins from Roger's Gardens before they caught up with the burglar with a green thumb," reports CBS News.

The plant thief was reportedly recorded stealing on security cameras, but couldn't be nabbed in time as the culprit mostly struck late at night. Tired of the pattern, the director of operations at Roger's Gardens, Michael Sullivan, planted over half a dozen AirTags in the shrubs and plants at the nursery. Just over a week later, the thief picked a specimen with an AirTag secretly planted on it.

As soon as Sullivan found it missing and traced the location, Newport Beach police officials kicked into action and found a whole cache of missing plant derivatives on the porch of a 53-year-old person. In a similar incident, an Adelaide-based couple planted AirTags in plants on their porch, after being repeatedly targeted by a plant thief.

AirTags are definitely a neat convenience and a law-abiding citizen's good friend, but we strongly suggest that you inform local law officials and not go on a solo vigilante journey after tracking a lost item on the Find My network.