- People keep coming to a Reddit user’s house looking for their lost iPhones
- It may be due to a quirk in how Apple’s Find My system works.
- It sounds similar to another case from ten years ago.
If someone showed up at your door claiming that your lost device was at your address (and you knew it definitely wasn’t), you might feel a little confused, but not too upset. But if it happened repeatedly over a period of years, you would start to worry. That’s exactly what’s been happening to one long-suffering Reddit user, and the cause remains a mystery.
As the victim recounted in her recent Reddit thread: “About 3 or 4 years ago, two men showed up at our door because one of them had an iPhone stolen the night before and the Find My app brought them to our house.” However, the device was not there and the men left.
“Since then, we’ve had at least four or five more cases of random people, with their iPad or a friend’s phone in their hand, saying ‘My phone is here,'” they continued. “It’s frustrating to have to explain to them that this has happened and we don’t have them.”
But aside from the sheer confusion of the incidents, the original poster was also concerned for their safety. “We are both women and I don’t want a man to get angry about losing his phone and hurt us,” they worried.
Some people thought this might be more than just a case of mistaken identity or Find My having a problematic moment. “I’ve seen Ring doorbell videos posted that say this is a common scam these days,” one said, with another adding, “I would call the police. It could be someone trying to get onto your property, whatever they do, don’t let them in.”
Can something be done?
Situations like this can be worrying, especially if they keep happening and different people show up at your door. But this isn’t the first time Apple’s Find My feature has confused people in this way, with a similar case reported in 2013, for example.
And in 2016, the Reply All podcast investigated after a strikingly similar occurrence in Atlanta, GA. In the end, the podcast concluded that it all had to do with the “digital desert” present in the area, with the Atlanta victims being one of the few homes with a router in the area.
As the podcast explained, if a lost phone tries to broadcast its location, it could do so by connecting to GPS. If that’s not feasible, it will try to find the closest IP addresses and Wi-Fi networks, triangulating based on the relative strengths of those networks.
If the center of that IP address area happens to be a person’s home, that’s where people looking for your lost device will end up. Additionally, considering how few routers there were in the area, any lost phone that was relatively close and couldn’t connect to GPS could have found the victims’ router as an alternative, leading people directly to the home in question.
What is the answer?
Apple’s Find My feature uses Bluetooth to connect to a network of other devices and use them to locate the location of a lost phone.
So it’s possible that the solution to the Reddit puzzle is slightly different than the one suggested by Reply All. An alternative suggested on Reddit was that stolen devices are handled nearby and send a “ping” before being dismantled or disabled. That ping is an approximate location, but it turns out that it lines up with the victims’ home, sending people to their door.
Another possibility has to do with Wi-Fi networks, as was the case in 2016. This time, it was noted that Find My can record local Wi-Fi networks: if the strength of the victims’ home network is strong enough, nearby lost devices could show it as the phone’s last known location. The answer this time might be to add _nomap to the home network SSID name, as one user suggested.
But without a solid idea of what’s happening, finding solutions may not always be possible. As one commenter said, “Depending on where you live, your home may be the default location for many IP addresses on the map. Unfortunately, there is very little you can do about it.”
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