I found my stolen phone ...in Senegal
Tracker says it travelled 2,800 miles from Suffolk to tiny remote village
IF you’re unfortunate enough to have your mobile phone stolen, a locator app can be a helpful way of finding it.
But the tracker used by Richard Walker from Suffolk provided little comfort when it informed him that his iPhone had made it all the way to Senegal.
The handset, which had been stolen a few weeks earlier, was traced to the remote village of Birkilane in the West African nation – some 2,800 miles from where it was last seen.
Posting an image of the tracking data from the Find My iPhone app online, Mr Walker, from Felixstowe, joked: ‘My iPhone was stolen a couple weeks ago. Now it is in a forest in Senegal. Don’t understand why it left, it always said that I really pushed its buttons.’
He later posted a detailed map which seemed to suggest the phone had left the country either by hand or was sent in the post.
If the device was carried there by hand, it would have taken a 100-mile car journey from Felixstowe to London before two flights to Senegal’s capital Dakar via Lisbon in Portugal. From there, the device then would have travelled almost 150 miles before arriving in Birkilane.
Standard post from the UK to Sen-
‘They’re not called mobiles for nothing’
egal typically takes between one and eight weeks to get there, according to the Royal Mail.
Mr Walker, an author, claimed to be ‘closing in’ on the thieves. In the series of tweets which also feature aerial photographs, he said: ‘I am so closing in on these guys. Don’t look up now.’
Almost a third of ‘ thefts from the person’ – defined as items taken from someone using little or no force – are for their phones, which often end up abroad.
Gerson Likendja replied to Mr Walker’s tweet, saying that the same thing had happened to him.
He wrote: ‘My phone got stolen on Halloween and now it’s in a town called Ramallah in Palestine...’ Another responded: ‘When I got this email notifying me that my stolen iPhone had been found I didn’t expect it to be in Algeria... bit of a trek’.
David Scott said: ‘ They are not called mobiles for nothing!’
One user even suggested Louis Theroux, the documentarian who retweeted the post, should turn the story into a documentary. The Foreign Office says visits to Senegal are usually ‘trouble-free’. Mr Walker is also a freelance journalist and consultant on digital content and strategy.
He has spent time working in Africa and East Asia, and now advises the likes of the London Business School, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UPS.
Meanwhile – not that it would provide much comfort to Mr Walker – mobile phone thefts in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level for a decade. Some 401,000 owners had a device stolen in the year to March 2017, down from 446,000 in the previous 12 months. The number, equivalent to 0.9 per cent of all mobile owners, is almost half the total for 2006/07, when thefts were 796,000.
It represents a ‘statistically significant’ decline, according to the Office for National Statistics, which compiled the figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
The figures also show that thefts of phones are most common among young adults. Among 22 to 24-year- olds, 2.2 per cent had a mobile stolen in 2016/17 – down from 4.3 per cent in 2006/07. Mobiles were involved in 32 per cent of all thefts from the person in 2016/17, down from 51 per cent in 2014/15.
The average value of items stolen during thefts from the person rose from £202 in 2015/16 to £221 in 2016/17.
And the proportion of more expensive items stolen, valued between £500 and £999, also rose from around 3 per cent of thefts from the person in 2006/07 to 16 per cent in 2016/17.