What happens to a stolen smartphone?

A Dutch film student decided to secretly install tracking software and deliberately let his smartphone be stolen to find out who the thief is.

Have you ever seen a hand in your pocket to discover that your smartphone has been stolen? The feeling at that time was definitely very depressing and wanted to quickly find my property. However, once the other person intentionally steals, your intention is almost impossible.

Anthony van der Meer, a Dutch film student, experienced that feeling when he was having lunch in Amsterdam. Dissatisfied with the reaction of police in Amsterdam, the city had 300 phone steals every week, Meer decided to find out who the phone stealer was. He downloaded a homemade security software on a "decoy" phone, deliberately leaving the device stolen, then tracking the thief for weeks. He recorded the investigation process and turned it into a 22-minute short documentary called " Find My Phone ".

Meer installed on Android smartphone "bird bait" an anti-theft application called Cerberus, the software allows device owners to remotely access any file on the device, as well as secretly activate the smartphone's camera and microphone . However, leaving the "stolen" machine is not easy to do. He used to neglect the machine for 4 days but no thief took the bait. However, it was "lucky" that when Meer was ready to give up, the Android phone was finally stolen.

Thanks to the tracking software, he could know all the actions of the thief with the phone, even taking a close-up shot of his face. This must be a very lazy thief, when he doesn't bother to reset the device or delete any applications installed on it. However, an interesting detail is that after a while of watching, Meer feels sorry for those who steal his phone. Through good messages through location tracking, Meer realized he was a homeless person, without money. With running Cerberus software, he is also consuming mobile data that thieves have to spend money to use. Finally, Meer decided to deposit money into his account.

The movie caught a lot of attention, and after a few days it had more than 3.5 million views. If you are interested, you can follow the entire short documentary in the video below.