I watched my stolen car travel 6,800 MILES thanks to gadget I hid inside it – I hired squad of sleuths to get it back
A MAN watched his stolen car travel 6,800 miles thanks to a gadget inside his car and then hired a squad of sleuths to get it back.
The 2022 GMC Yukon XL was stolen from a drive in Toronto last August and was then driven to the Port of Montreal.
The car was then shipped to the United Arab Emirates. The owner, who had already had a car stolen, had fitted an AirTag tracking device in the car.
AirTags work by sending out a BlueTooth signal that is detected by nearby smartphones and other connected devices in Apple’s Find My network.
The owner, who has asked not to be named, said: "We’ve done everything we possibly can, save going over there and trying to take it back ourselves. I want my truck back.”
Toronto resident Jordan Macdonald recovered his his new Toyota Highlander after it was stolen last year through an AirTag.
The device revealed that the truck was within a secured shipping container aboard a rail car.
The AirTag then went offline for nearly a month before showing up again in the port of Antwerp in Belgium, and then in the UAE.
A private investigator was able to find the vehicle in a used car lot, sending photos back to the owner showing the same mileage and vehicle identification number.
The Canada Border Services Agency said it intercepted 1,806 stolen vehicles last year.
Detective Inspector Scott Wade from Ontario Provincial Police told CBC it was “alarmingly common” for vehicles stolen in Canada to be exported to the Middle East, Europe or Africa.
He said: "Right now, they’re making so much money shipping cars that the low risk and high reward is too lucrative for organised crime [to pass up]."
A British couple recently used the device to keep an eye on their children. Ruth Bradford slipped an AirTag into her childrens' pockets just in case they became lost.
The £29 tracking devices were paired with Ruth’s iPhone, sending out a secure Bluetooth signal that could be detected by nearby linked mobiles in the Find My network.
It allowed the mum, from Bristol, and her husband Karl, 44, a lawyer, to see their kids’ location on a map in the app, should they get lost or run off.
AirTags were launched by Apple in 2021 to track belongings, but rising numbers of parents now buy them to keep an eye on their most precious possessions instead.
More than 55 million were sold in the first 18 months, with the coin-sized tags particularly popular for use on toddlers and primary-school pupils who do not own mobiles, and kids with learning disabilities.