Quote:
Originally Posted by P1et
Wow. How did they steal your phone? And how did you get it back?
|
It either dropped out of the outer pocket of my work bag or the scumbag yanked it out of my bag. It's hard to tell as I was at a very crowded work function with tons of people running around including wait staff. I think if I had dropped it I would have heard a thunk but because the room was so loud maybe I didn't hear it.
Regardless, I realized it was missing 45 minutes after I last reached for my phone. I immediately asked the conference organizers if someone had turned it in and I also went to security immediately who then contacted all the wait staff. So I know if the person wasn't intent on stealing the phone he/she would have turned it in at that point. What burns me up was this low life degenerate was probably watching me desperately searching the event room looking for my phone with security in tow.
After the phone not turning up the next day, I figured I will never see the phone again and went to get a new phone. A week later, I get this phone call from a Sprint store in Aurora, Illinois. The rep tells me they have my phone. I was WTF? The rep tells me a person came in to their store and tried to activate it. When the rep went into the system, they saw I had placed a lost/stolen flag on it. At that point, he confiscated the phone and broke the news to the guy. The rep said he didn't think the guy knew the phone was lost/stolen. I got the guy's contact info from the rep.
I call the guy and he tells me he bought it from an ad in Craig's List. He bought it at around 4:30 in the afternoon less than 24 hours after my phone was stolen and right around the time I was getting my new phone. He said he had checked with Sprint to see if the phone was legit which Sprint said at the time it was. That's why he went ahead and bought the phone. He paid $125 for it.
What burns me is I would have given a reward if that was what this ahole wanted for my phone...actually the SD card to come back to me intact with all the videos and photos on it. I could have cared less for the phone. This degenerate knew what he/she was doing. Because I tried calling my phone to see if it would ring or someone would pick up after realizing it was missing. The call went straight to voice mail. So the prick shut my phone off immediately to prevent me from locating it. Because I tried locating it with Android Device Manager. Then this prick probably knew enough to quickly unload the phone as he/she probably knew it would take some time for Sprint's database to update fully with my lost/stolen tag on the phone. All of this shows this wasn't the first time this jerk has done this and has had experience doing this before.
Meanwhile I file a police report with CPD and they initially took it as a lost item report as I had no proof the phone was stolen. When I got the additional information above a week later, I call the police department with the new information and said the status of my report should now be elevated to a stolen item report. The cop I spoke to said he couldn't update the case notes as a detective wasn't assigned to it yet but would take down the information and have someone get back to me. Well that was a few months ago. By now any potential of actually catching this crook or the people working in cahoots is long gone. I didn't even do anything with my recovered S5 in case they wanted to dust it for prints but I can see now they just don't care. I guess I placed a bit more faith in the system than was realistic.