Chasing A Lost Phone: A GPS-enabled Adventure
Last week, my younger brother and I chased his missing smartphone.
We were at Timezone Trinoma when suddenly my brother realized he lost his phone. I called his number but it just kept on ringing. He wasn’t sure if it was set in silent mode. Our next instinct was to go look at the security footage, but disappointingly, it didn’t give us any hint as to where the phone had disappeared to.
After a while, we had an epiphany that my brother had shared his location with me via Google Maps. We used this to track his phone and it showed that it was still in Trinoma. Eventually, the location pointer moved to the SM North area. We decided to chase it and hurriedly made our way to the connecting bridge between the two malls. When I refreshed the location, it showed that the pointer was back around Trinoma, outside the mall, near the bus stop along the intersection. With a 15-inch laptop in my backpack, I again led my brother to the exact location indicated in the app. I approached a security guard nearby and explained the situation to him. But just as he agreed to assist us, the GPS location again jumped. This time by hundreds of meters. It appeared that whoever was carrying the phone was now in a moving vehicle.
With our motivation lost, we walked back towards the entrance of the mall. Still desperately looking at the GPS pin on the map, we noticed that it entered Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center and then stopped moving. This spot was just around two kilometers away from our current location. So I asked my brother if he wanted to go and chase the phone. We hesitated because our grandmother and cousin were waiting for us inside Trinoma, but ultimately decided to give it a go. Well, this would be an adventure, I thought.
After we hailed a taxi, the worst possible thing happened. I couldn’t refresh the GPS location anymore. The missing device suddenly went offline.
We pushed through with our mission regardless. Just after several minutes, we were explaining the situation to the guard at the gate of the park. Inside the park, a couple of on-duty guards on bikes accompanied us as we walked toward the last known GPS location of the missing phone. We reached a lagoon where four men with backpacks were sitting on a nearby wooden fence, perhaps unwinding from a day’s work. What I knew for sure was that the phone had been at that exact spot just 15 minutes ago, so I asked them how long they have been there. One person unconvincingly mumbled that they arrived not long ago.
I called the phone. It’s no longer reachable. I looked at the guys suspiciously, while two of the guards slowly surrounded them, I guess in case they run away. The other guards along with my brother walked towards a cottage where two students, a boy and a girl, were sitting. Moments later, my brother shouted in our direction. We ran to the small hut and found my brother’s hand now firmly grasping his missing phone. They found it! Surrounded by the security personnel of the park, the young man was nervously explaining how they found the phone and tried looking for its owner. What’s suspicious was that (as my brother eventually told me) they initially denied finding a cellphone, when my brother and the park guard approached them. Good thing my brother was alert enough to point out the familiar gold-colored phone resting on the guy’s palm. They returned it. The phone turned out to be already wiped clean. We submitted a report of the incident at the park’s security office but decided not to press charges. We were not certain whether my brother really dropped the phone but there was clearly no intent on their part to return it.
Lost phone: 2:15 pm
Retrieved phone: 3:25 pm
Mission accomplished. 😎
TL;DR version: My brother lost his phone in Timezone Trinoma and we tracked it all the way to Ninoy Aquino Parks & Wildlife Center. We successfully retrieved the phone, though it was already reformatted.
P.S. Since I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries, here’s how to share your live location using Google Maps. You can also do the same using Facebook Messenger.
Originally posted on Facebook (June 2018): https://www.facebook.com/mikorobyo/posts/10214278259883206
