My wife (yes it was her fault!) was looking at something on our way outside of Target and somewhere between Target and the car, she left my phone in the cart or on a ledge outside the store. I asked her for it after we'd driven away and she didn't have it. We panicked. Not a terribly busy day at the store so we thought it would just be sitting in the cart. We raced back to the store and probably hadn't been gone for 5 minutes and the phone was gone. We retraced all our steps, went to ask for the lost and found and it was just gone. Then it hit me:

"Find My iPhone app." What a beautiful creation.

We turned on my wife's phone and could see that my phone was now 3 blocks from the store. Someone had my phone! And I could see exactly where they were! As we refreshed the app we could see the person was moving too slow to be in a car and as we made our way over to the little dot on the map I realized that I didn't want to confront the thief on our own. Fortunately for us we passed a police car on our way and we managed to convince him to follow us on our little righteous crusade. As the Police Cruiser followed us we drove right up to this lady in her 50s sitting on a bench on the otherwise deserted Industrial-looking street. Police Officer went up to her and asked her if she had picked up an iphone and she said she did and handed it right over. She said she had heard it ringing but didn't answer it and said she just "found it". Police started interrogating her and got her ID... I was not happy. Note to all you dumb Cougarboard thieves out there: If you're going to swipe an iPhone, make sure the phone is OFF so the owner can't remotely find you, locate the police, and then bring all kinds of law enforcement right to your door with nasty "you are about to have a bad day" questions.

I can't imagine this poor lady who was wondering how on earth we found her and who probably had no idea how smartphones work. Really couldn't tell if she was looking to steal and/or keep it, but it does strike me as odd that she didn't answer it and didn't try to take it back to Target L&F. I felt sorry for her really. All kinds of things getting stolen from me at Target these days.

Got to thank and tell the Police Officer that he saved the day! I figure they have a lot of thankless days and wanted to make sure this wasn't one of them. We were so happy to get it back!

Find My Phone FTW!