People who lost their phones, got a young couple from Atlanta

Фото: Depositphotos

In February, 2015, a young couple moved to a new home in a suburb of Atlanta. The house belongs to the parents of Christina Lee, who works as a journalist. Together with her lives her young man - engineer Michael Saba. Almost immediately after moving, people who had lost their phones began to come to them both day and night: the function “Find my phone” indicated that the lost device was at their address. Neither Lee nor Saba knew anything about phones. Every time they were surprised by the sudden visits.

Once policemen came to the young people with a search. They were looking for the missing girl - the geolocation of her phone showed that the child was in the house. Lee and Sabu put out on the street. When Saba asked to put him in the shower: the police said: "Your home is a crime scene, and you two can interest us."

In 2013, a resident of Las Vegas encountered a similar problem. People also came to him and demanded to return the phones. It turned out that all the devices were connected to the Sprint operator, and the man’s house was in the very center of the coverage area of ​​one of the operator’s towers. As a result, his address was called as standard in the area if it could not be determined more precisely.

However, the story of Lee and Saba is more complicated - the phones that people are looking for in their home have nothing in common. These can be both iPhones and Android devices, and all of them have been connected to different operators.

Near the house of Lee and Saba are three cell towers. The closest one belongs to the T-Mobile operator. The company did not respond to inquiries from the couple and the journalists; it was not possible to achieve anything from Apple and Google either. In the US Federal Communications Commission, they were told that they were not involved in such cases.

Experts say that the situation with an incorrect definition of geolocation may be associated with an error in determining the location by GPS or Wi-Fi, or an error in setting up cellular tower equipment, but they cannot say for sure.

For the year, the owners of lost phones have come to Lee and Saba more than ten times.

As previously wrote ForumDaily, Google запустил in its maps service Maps offline to view maps, navigate and search.