Thief Nabbed After Swiping iPhone Used for GPS Testing

A useful tip to all would-be iPhone thieves: when stealing said iPhone, it's a good idea to make sure it's not running a real-time GPS tracking program. Unfortunately for Horatio Toure, he had to learn this life lesson the hard way.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the 31-year-old Toure recently stole an iPhone from a seemingly ordinary woman, Jordan Sturm, whom he stealthily targeted while riding around on his bicycle. He didn't realize, though, that the phone was running a GPS program, which clearly identified where the thief was heading. The woman, as it turns out, was an assistant to David Kahn, chief exec at Covia Labs of Mountain View. Kahn lent the phone to his assistant, Sturm, in order for him to demonstrate a new GPS-enabled program called Alert & Respond. As Sturm walked around San Francisco, Kahn was mapping her exact location on his laptop, and promoting the product before an audience of public relations employees in another part of town. When Toure swiped her phone, then, police easily tracked him down and arrested him about ten minutes after the incident.

Ironically enough, this series of events probably couldn't have been scripted any better for Kahn's promotion. The Alert & Respond program, you see, is designed explicitly to keep track of people and resources, and is reportedly geared for use in military and police departments. Kahn told the Chronicle that he was even tempted to play around with some of the program's other features during the real-time robbery, but didn't want to tip his hand to Toure. He may not have been able to show off his program's full arsenal of GPS weapons, but it seems like Kahn (and Toure) still made a strong pitch, anyway. [From: SFGate]

Tags: alert, Apple, cellphones, dumbcriminals, GPS, GpsTracking, iphone, iphoneapp, san francisco, SanFrancisco, thief, top