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Tech Tuesday, January 15th 2013 at 2:55 pm

Find My iPhone Keeps Sending Sprint Customers to 59-Year-Old Retiree’s House

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At first blush, Find My iPhone seems like pretty much the best. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, you can track it via GPS in order to retrieve it. In theory, that’s wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to track down and find their lost smartphone? In practice, however, it turns out that our advanced technology is still basically a garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. Just ask Wayne Dobson, 59-year-old Las Vegas retiree. Find My iPhone has been mistakenly sending folks to his house for years.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, it appears that the problem only affects a small number of Sprint customers. Find My iPhone, for whatever reason, will gives the coordinates for Mr. Dobson’s house whenever these unsuspecting Sprint customers try to locate their lost gadgets. When they show up, they’re adamant that Dobson has their phone, and the police have been called more than once.

It’s gotten to the point where he’s actually posted a sign outside his door with big bold letters reading, “NO LOST CELL PHONES!!” He also sleeps near the door on the weekends in order to answer it whenever someone inevitably knocks. Dobson’s trials and tribulations started in 2011, and there’s currently no solution on the horizon.

For their part, Sprint has said they’re looking into the matter. Current speculation is that there’s something happening at their switchboard that’s incorrectly sending out Dobson’s coordinates for whatever reason. Then again, someone at Sprint could also just really hate the man. That’s always a possibility.

(Las Vegas Review-Journal via Business Insider, image via Ben Dodson)

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  • Anonymous

    Especially after all this time, whether Sprint fixes the cause of the problem or not they could have the application modified to return an error whenever his coordinates show up. It’d make him and his neighbors a safe haven for actual lost phones, but at least he’d be spared the harassment.

  • Idlethoughts

    Sprint really should have made this right by now.

  • Jack Bond

    Maybe that guy should stop nabbing free cellphones.

  • Idlethoughts

    “Current speculation is that there’s something happening at their switchboard that’s incorrectly sending out Dobson’s coordinates for whatever reason.” Did you even read the article?

  • Jack Bond

    It’s called a joke, dude. Don’t be so combative.

  • Idlethoughts

    It’s hard to tell wether your being willfully ignorant or obtuse as a joke or as a genuine stance on an issue; you do so much of both.

  • Jack Bond

    If it’s about something serious, I’m probably at least partially serious. If it’s about something inconsequential like cellphone bugs, probably not.