This is why you should never mess with a CEO of a cybersecurity company…
Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity research and consulting firm, shared in a 22 tweet thread about his journey of recovering his stolen electric scooter using Apple’s Airtags. Guido’s scooter was stolen on 2nd August but unknown to the thief, he had also hidden two AirTags inside the scooter and concealed them with duct tape so they weren’t easily detected. In case you’re not familiar with AirTags, they are little Bluetooth trackers that can easily be used to keep track of your stuff and show up on the Find My app.
Starting his hunt for the scooter, Guido tried to get the New York City Police Department on board but they weren’t willing to cooperate as they deemed it unethical to go round ‘knocking on doors or entering stores’ without any evidence. “They weren’t familiar with Airtags, thought I might be enlisting them to steal something,” Guido tweeted. In a series of bad-timed incidents, Guido had to catch a flight to Las Vegas and had to pause his hunt for a few days. What worried him was the alert feature of the AirTags that start making sounds if separated from their owner at any random time which could have blown his cover and alerted the robbers while he was away. Fortunately, no one discovered the trackers and he resumed his search after coming back on 9th August. This time, he made sure to get two NYPD officers to accompany him to the scooter’s location.
All the searching paid off when he came close to an e-bike store and received a ping on his app alerting him that his scooter was nearby. Finding his way through the pile of second-hand scooters, Guido finally recognized his own scooter among them! It took him a while to convince the employees that he was the real owner of the scooter but in the end, he was reunited with it and all the detective work finally paid off! At the end of the twitter thread, Guido also left tips for other AirTag users on how they can use them more efficiently and prevent theft of their personal items. Seems like Apple might be seeing an increase in the sales of AirTags soon…
