Criminals Love the Air Tag…
We have mentioned a number of incidents where criminals or ex-boyfriends have tried to use Apple’s (AAPL) Air Tags to track people or items (high value cars most often) and Apple’s noteworthy attempts to make such use considerably more difficult, but once again criminals have tried to stalk a vehicle by attaching an Air Pod in the hope that they could track the whereabouts of a Japanese police detective. Last May a detective in the Aichi Prefecture police force was about to get into his unmarked car parked in the station’s visitor parking lot when he noticed a small black box attached to the car’s muffler. When he removed it he found it contained an Air Tag, at which point he alerted other officers about such a possibility, although no other tags were found.
In Japan it is hard to buy an Air Tag for cash so the odds are that the purchase can be traced, and whoever planted it knew little about car mufflers, which heat up to over 500⁰ and would have likely melted the box and the Air Tag, which has a temperature tolerance of 140⁰. Considering that Air Tags have serial numbers that link the devices to the Apple account ID that activates them, the police should have an easy path toward discovering the person that planted the device, and Apple has stated publicly it will cooperate with any legitimate law enforcement requests concerning the illegal use of Air Tags. While the idea of the tag was likely to stay one step ahead of the detective, the choice of using an Air Tag and its placement was a bit amateurish, as the Japanese police take even the pilfering of fruit or candy as a crime worth investigating, and other tag types have less traceable roots, but the choice of the muffler as the hiding spot was a new low in criminal intelligence.
In Japan it is hard to buy an Air Tag for cash so the odds are that the purchase can be traced, and whoever planted it knew little about car mufflers, which heat up to over 500⁰ and would have likely melted the box and the Air Tag, which has a temperature tolerance of 140⁰. Considering that Air Tags have serial numbers that link the devices to the Apple account ID that activates them, the police should have an easy path toward discovering the person that planted the device, and Apple has stated publicly it will cooperate with any legitimate law enforcement requests concerning the illegal use of Air Tags. While the idea of the tag was likely to stay one step ahead of the detective, the choice of using an Air Tag and its placement was a bit amateurish, as the Japanese police take even the pilfering of fruit or candy as a crime worth investigating, and other tag types have less traceable roots, but the choice of the muffler as the hiding spot was a new low in criminal intelligence.
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