A criminal and an iPhone don’t mix well together in LA

What is the stupidest thing you can do when you steal someone’s iPhone?

Daft criminals and technology have had a long and often entertaining relationship that has spanned many decades.

After all, we live in a world where true privacy and anonymity are now much harder to achieve, in a world where tracing or monitoring a person’s whereabouts through the various technologies available has never been easier.

This, of course, is not necessarily a good thing for criminals. They often do what they do with an expectation – or at least a hope – of not because getting seen, identified and thus caught.

And whilst many criminals fall foul of surveillance technologies like CCTV or perhaps leave subtle digital clues leading authorities to their doorstep, there are those criminals that just fail so spectacularly you are left wondering how they just don’t fall over more.

And so we have our story’s burglar, who last week broke into an L.A. home and stole an iPhone whilst 3 women were sleeping in rooms only metres away.

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The only problem, however, was that when snatching the phone, our bumbling villain unwittingly initiated the video application and recorded a mini-movie that… yes… clearly showed his face.

Maybe ten or so years ago this would not have been such a problem, but most modern phones these days will back-up media like photos and videos to the owners online cloud storage account, which in this case it did. The iPhone owner was able to see the inadvertent broadcast when they logged in, and duly sent it straight to the police. Thus, the picture they released below.

Say cheese.

So what’s pretty much the stupidest thing you can do when you steal someone’s iPhone? Well, we haven’t considered every single possibility, but taking a video of yourself and sending it to the owner has got to be up there pretty high, right?

If you live in the area and see the man, the LAPD bulletin can be seen here with contact information.