What you need to know
- Apple's AirTag helped to prevent the second theft of a pickup truck.
- The new owner found the item tracker after being alerted to it with his iPhone.
An AirTag has helped foil a stolen truck plot.
As reported by Fox 7 in Austin, a man discovered an AirTag in a truck he recently purchased after he received a notification about it on his iPhone. After reporting the incident to the police, they found that the truck that the man bought was actually stolen.
Lt. Beyer of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office says that the thieves had most likely placed the AirTag in the truck, sold the stolen truck to the man, and then planned to find it and steal it all over again.
Lt. Beyer believes a double steal was about to be in play. "I'm sure the individuals who had the tracking device in there probably had a key to it so all they had to do was follow this guy, to where ever the car was parked, get in it, take off in it," he said.
The good news here is that the truck was returned to its actual owner. The bad news is that the man who unknowingly bought the stolen truck is out of the $800 down payment that he made.
This isn't the first instance of someone using an item tracker for nefarious purposes, even in Fayette County. Lt. Beyer spoke of another occurrence where a device was being used to track the daughter of a local business owner.
"We did here recently have a local business owner came down, talked to our sheriff and their daughter was having issues with one of her vehicles, and they were able to find under the dashboard there was a tracking device on that particular vehicle," said Lt. Beyer.
Apple's AirTag was launched as a way for people to keep track of their items including keys, backpacks, and more. It has, however, also been misused for nefarious purposes. Apple's privacy and safety features for the product have helped like in the story above, but the general consensus is that the company (and all other products like it) need to do more to protect against misuse of these item trackers.
Bottom line: For iPhone owners, this is the best item tracker on the market right now. With simple pairing and easy-to-use software, AirTags are a kind excellent Apple product of the same vintage as Apple's AirPod family.
