Michael Saba and Christina Lee regularly receive unexpected visitors.
But almost every week for the past year, they have had angry visitors knocking on the door on their Atlanta home demanding their stolen phones back.
Sometimes the drop-ins arrive at the unassuming weatherboard house in the middle of the night, sometimes in groups and occasionally accompanied by police officers.
All of them have been led there by a mobile phone tracking app. But strangely, the visitors all have different phone models and are with a variety of networks, none of whom have accepted responsibility for the chaos.
Michael and Christina have done everything they can to find out what’s going on, with no success. After 12 visits in just under a year, it has become a source of enormous stress.
“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our housebecause of this,” Saba told fusion.net.
In June, police arrived in search of a missing teenage girl, forcing the couple to wait outside for an hour because their house was a crime scene and they were persons of interest.
In May, Paul Middleton used the Find My iPhone app to find his aunt Beth Ring’s mobile after it fell 300 metres from a helicopter in the Northern Territory.Source:Supplied
The young couple are not the first to be wrongly accused of phone theft thanks to phone finding apps. Las Vegas retiree Wayne Dobson spent two years fielding visits from phone owners and the police looking for missing mobiles.
“I’m 59 years old. I don’t care about these technology pets they have,” he said in 2013.
His case was more easily solved. It turned out that all the phones were on the Sprint network, and Mr Dobson’s home was directly in the centre of one of their mobile coverage zones.
His nerves, on the other hand, still jangled when he heard cars coming down his street months later.
When an app wrongly directed a New Jersey baseball umpire to his son’s stolen phone, he ended up punching an innocent bystander.
In Nottingham, England, a homeowner was forced to pay $1000 for a new front doorafter police kicked his down looking for a phone thief. They refused to pay for damage they caused after being led there by inaccurate tracking data.
Wireless tracking technology has seen internet users accused of even more heinous crimes committed using their connections.
In 2009 and 2011, innocent men from New York were accused of downloading child porn after neighbours used their Wi-Fi. In 2010, a man from Florida was visited by the FBI after a boat docked outside used a can antenna to boost a wireless signal and downloaded 10 million underage porn images.
In Germany, a musician sued an internet user whose wireless was used to download and illegally share a song, even though he was on holiday at the time, leading to new laws over protecting your connection.
Even as technology develops like wildfire, it’s still happening. A SWAT team raided a home in Indiana last year, breaking glass and handcuffing a mother and daughter, before realising it was a neighbour who had made online threats against police.
Tracking apps have helped victims and police to solve crimes and find missing phones. In May, Paul Middleton used Find my iPhone to locate his aunt’s still-working mobile after it fell 300 metres from a helicopter in the Northern Territory. But there’s a real risk of getting it wrong.
As for Michael and Christina, they’re filing a complaint with their senator in the hope that someone will help them get their lives back.
[Souce:- news.com.au]
