A man from Maidstone, Kent expressed his disbelief after his missing Apple AirPod earphones bizarrely resurfaced in one of the last places in the world he suspected
Apple’s ‘Find My’ app is a very useful tool when it comes to helping to locate our mislaid devices – not just our mobile phones, but other gadgets made by the tech giant including iPads, MacBooks and AirPods earphones. Using the app, the iCloud service allows owners to view on a map where such devices are located at present – or where their last location before running out of battery.
That has proven useful for one X user in Kent who had been struggling to find his AirPods – only for them to finally emerge thousands of miles away. In a post shared to the social media platform, user JB revealed the wireless earphones were in fact now in war-torn Iran – some 2,704 miles from his native Maidstone.
“Hope the bod who nicked my AirPods on Maidstone high street and fled to Tehran is doing okay,” JB added saractically in a caption. The tweet quickly gathered projection, viewed more than one million times over the weekend with hundreds of X users offering their thoughts in response.
“If Apple were truly innovative they would enable a feature where you can talk or relay nuisance noise into one’s stolen AirPods anywhere in the world,” one person declared, before joking: “Rachel Reeves speeches on repeat for example.”
A second pondered: “Real question is how they ended up all the way in Iran of all b**ody places.”
A third claimed: “Tehran is one of the few places in the world where you can send/sell stolen Apple gear – they will gut an iPhone and replace enough of it so it can be used normally again without the iCloud lockout.”
A fourth joked: “You’re better than me – I would be playing sounds at 3am their time and during the day so they loose their hearing.”
Whilst a fifth X user shared a similar unfortunate scenario alongside a screenshot: “Just like my phone got stolen one day, next day was in South Africa.”
Back in 2019, British student Lainey Fricker-Harrison was left shocked when her lost iPhone ended up 6,000 miles away in Hong Kong. Lainey lost the iPhone 6S during a shopping trip and said it had her entire ‘life’ on it. After a fruitless search, she was resigned to never getting the phone back.
“I went home and got a new phone the next day. It’s not as though it’s a valuable phone, it’s quite old,” she said at the time. Lainey put her phone on ‘lost’ mode on Find My iPhone, so no one could access her data.
A month later, after purchasing a new device, she received a message from a ‘random email address’ on Monday, more than a month later, saying her lost phone had been activated with a new sim card.
She then received some suspicious messages that she thinks were a scam, saying her photo stream had been ‘restored’ into the phone of ‘Mr Jack’. She didn’t click on the link as a precaution, and changed her phone from lost mode to ‘erase my iPhone’.
Lainey logged on to Find My iPhone and discovered the device was in Hong Kong, near the border with China.
Apple says of the technology online: “If you’ve lost or misplaced an Apple device or a personal item with an AirTag attached, use Find My to locate your device or item on a map. You can get directions to its location and, when you’re nearby, play a sound or even get help finding its exact location.”
The company further advises users to mark their device as lost if unable to locate. “While you look for your device or item, you should mark it as lost,” Apple says online.
“This puts your device in Lost Mode – locking it with a passcode or your Apple Account password, and for devices compatible with Apple Pay, suspending any payment cards and passes that you use with Apple Pay.
“You can also display a message that allows others to get in touch with you if they find your device or item.”
