14 Dec Mobile GPS with a $100 Ransom | Found My Wife’s Stolen Phone!

Last Friday, I came home to chaos.  Dinner plans… Christmas tree decorating… and on top of that, I still had some work to do before I could enjoy my weekend.

My wife was at the mall and came home stating that she lost her phone.  JOY.

I called the phone, and for whatever reason, the young lady that picked it up thought that she deserved $100 for finding the phone, and actually stated that she would keep the phone if she did not receive $100, payable in non-counterfeit bills.

Chuckling to myself, I told the young lady that I was an undercover spy and would find a way to get the phone back.  I passed the phone to my wife, thinking that it was a joke.  It was not.  The young lady reiterated the same offer to my wife also–>  $100 or else your little phone goes bye bye!

My wife gave up and started calling Sprint to discontinue the service.

Instantly, I googled “Sprint GPS systems” or something similar and saw where Sprint had a Family Location service, where they can use GPS-enabled phones to show on a virtual map, where a particular phone of a family member is.

Pretty good for kids.  Bad for adults in places they should not be 🙂

We signed up for the free trial with the friendly Sprint representative and were in action tracking the phone live from our laptops.

I jumped in the car like some vigilante, out on a recovery mission.  The adrenaline rush was lovely, as I called my wife periodically asking her to refresh her screen.  Finally, we had the phone located on a short street in Decatur with about 20 houses on it.  She actually counted the roof tops on the map, and told me which house it was at!

As I pulled up, I saw 4 college-aged girls jumping in a car.  They pulled off.  I got their tag number, make and model, and called Dekalb County Police department.  As they pulled off, I followed, and again had my wife refresh her Sprint Family Locator map.  She confirmed that they were on the move.

Eventually, I lost them as they weaved in and out of traffic.  But my wife did say that the phone had stopped moving.  She gave me the address at a convenience store and stated that Sprint’s location was accurate with a radius up to 12 yards.  I got out of the car and before I started rummaging through the close-by dumpster, saw the phone nicely laid on the concrete parking lot.  Couple of feet over, and I would have run it over!

I presume that my statement of being an undercover spy was making them paranoid.  They definitely saw this cool Honda trailing them in and out of traffic and into and out of parking lots.

I was elated to find the phone and my wife was even more elated.  Personally, I was happy to beat the extortion that they put us through.  I called the county police back and told them no further investigation was needed.

I was just happy that I was an adrenaline junkie for the evening, that they weren’t psycho’s that could have done something crazy to me for following them, and more than ever, appreciate the GPS capabilities of the Sprint Blackberry.

Doing a little bit of Googling, shows me that others have had similar experiences.  Guess it is cool, when phones have a built-in “lo jack” 🙂

Now, I am off to my dungeon, to figure out and further appreciate GPS mobile marketing strategies and how we can use FourSquare and other GPS sites for the betterment of our interactive marketing campaigns.