Thieves Walk Out Of An Apple Store With 19 iPhones During Store Hours

If you're confident and act as though you belong somewhere, chances are that few people will question your presence. And as a pair of thieves recently learned, it helps if you're dressed appropriately. At the SoHo Apple store, two people were able to simply walk in, and take 19 iPhones from a drawer, and walk out as if nothing happened, just because they were confident and dressed the part.

To pull off the heist, one person dressed up to look as though they worked at the store. This is a pretty easy endeavor, as the Apple Store uniforms are pretty simple. You just need a shirt with a small Apple logo on it, and you're good to go. With the right attire, the man was able to walk into the back room and remove 19 iPhones, which he then handed to his accomplice. And then they simply walked out of the store as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

It's hardly an Ocean's 11-style heist, but it was very effective. The phones were worth just over $16,000 in total. It's likely that at least one of them had prior knowledge about the layout of the back room of the store, so as to know exactly where the phones were located. But aside from that, Apple's lax security in the store allowed them to walk in and out without a single person questioning them.

This isn't even the first time such a thing has happened at an Apple store. Another Manhattan store was hit on two separate occasions this year. The first time the thief managed to snag just three phones, while the second attempt netted them a whopping 59 iPhones.

One can only imagine that Apple is looking into new ways to identify actual employees, so as to prevent these sorts of events from happening. My biggest question is how no one noticed the large number of phones being removed from the back room. I have a feeling that people rarely purchase phones from the store in such quantities.

Source: PC Mag