Leaving valuable items in the car is generally not a good idea. However, there are cases like the one reported by user JBake on Reddit where this is justified. What you wouldn’t expect is to be victim of theft by employees of a car rental service. An AirTag was both part of the flight and part of the solution.
The big mistake: leaving the AirTag with the car open
JBake was on a business trip to a city very far from his own, so he had no choice but to rent a vehicle. One morning, he noticed that the car had lost pressure in its tires because of a nail inserted into one of the wheels. We don’t know if this was intentional or if he just accidentally got stuck while driving with it, but that’s not important. Yes it was flight trigger. And not exactly the car.
The protagonist of this story did not want to take risks and decided to replace this rental car with another one. So that’s what he did when he went into service. rent a car near the airport and where he had gone a few days earlier for the first rental. He got out of the car and, advised by a dealership employee, He left everything in the car while he drove to the customer service office.. The car keys themselves, an AirTag and a charging cable were included.
JBake had been waiting in line for ten minutes to change vehicles when, after being treated, he returned to the car and got a surprise. AirTag and charging cable were missing. This surprised him greatly, given that despite the keys in the vehicle, there were other items such as water jugs in the vehicle which made it clear that his tenant was coming back.
“Where is my AirTag?”
The AirTag can be easily located with the “Find” app on the iPhone, so it wouldn’t take much for JBake to find its new location. Especially when only a few minutes had passed since she left him in that first rental car. However, he admitted to “going crazy for 15-20 minutes looking for the AirTag.”
JBake suspected the thief of removing the AirTag battery
In the “Search” app, the accessory continued to mark the car as the last location. He tried to look for it without success until an employee of rent a car He approached him with his charging cable in hand, but without the AirTag. “Where is my AirTag?” asked JBake. There was no response.
There was no choice but to mark the AirTag as lost and, after talking with a few employees, he eventually got the idea that the thief must have removed the battery from the accessory and left . You might be suspicious of the employees of the rent a car nor the airport itself where the establishment was located, but there was nothing to do. Or yes…
And suddenly, an alert at the airport
Minutes after suffering this loss and leaving the area, JBake received an alert on his iPhone. The AirTag was located nearby, in the same premises as the airport. So he decided to return to the counter and there the employees came running to ask him if he had found it. He said no, but that he knew it was nearby and had come back in case, as he had previously been told, someone had left it on the counter. But no.
Likewise, JBake wanted to go to the counter just in case. On this path, Alerts went off again saying the AirTag was close, very close. So much so that as he got closer, he received signals that he was only a few meters away. Everything pointed to it being on the counter.
The surprise was that upon arriving at this table and asking an employee if anyone had given her an AirTag, she denied it. He looked in the back room and in the drawers, but no. He even gave her his own personal bag so she could check to make sure she didn’t have it. “Suspicious“, said JBake, who had in no way accused this employee and his attitude was strange to say the least.
“I don’t know how he got there.”
Image generated with DALL-E 3
JBake, without wanting to accuse the employee, insists that the AirTag is on this desk. He even shows the employee the iPhone so she can witness it, but she continues to insist that there is no AirTag there.
So, already tired of this discussion, JBake decides to emit an audible alert on the AirTag. One of those that the accessory itself emits when it is near the iPhone. And as expected, it rings on this same desk. “By chance” the employee ends up finding him behind the deskclaiming to have no evidence of how he could have stopped there.
Ultimately, the protagonist of this story ended up getting his AirTag back and, although there is no conclusive proof of the culprits, he has a theory because, he says, “there is no other way that he could have ended up there.” And surely some employee found it in his first rental car and gave it to this girl at the counter with the intention of hiding it. The latter tried to play dumb, but it didn’t work.
The lesson of this whole story is obvious and this is what its own protagonist also concludes: “thieves, don’t steal the AirTag“. As you can see, it is very easy to find them. And if not, they are deactivated and become unusable for anyone other than their rightful owner.
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