A woman managed to reunite herself with her stolen Apple iPhone after its new owner inadvertently posted a selfie to her Facebook timeline.
Nicole Shelton had her bag stolen whilst vacationing in Byron Bay, Australia. In it she lost her credit cards, her money and her phone.
However like many of us, her phone was connected to her Facebook account. Meaning she could easily upload photos taken from the device onto her Facebook timeline.
After the theft, Nicole was alerted to a strange photo showing two men that was posted onto her Facebook account. After initially assuming the men in the photo were the people responsible for her phone being stolen, she reposted the photo along with the caption asking people to track them down.
The photo was re-shared over 20,000 times, until it came to the attention of one of the men in the photo. However he wasn’t one of the criminals, he had purchased the phone, not knowing it had been stolen.
And after handing it in to a police station it wasn’t long before Nicole was reunited with her stolen phone, all thanks to Facebook.
In fact Facebook had come to the rescue twice. Firstly by being connected to the phone, which resulted in the photo getting posted onto Nicole’s account. Secondly by the large number of shares the photo received that resulted in the phone getting handed into a police station.
It is a happy ending, albeit an unusual one. Normally criminals would completely wipe a stolen phone, thus setting it back to its factory settings. However because this didn’t happen, the phone was still associated with Nicole’s Facebook account.
A very 21st century twist on what would normally be your run-of-the mill theft.
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