Personal recount of a phone theft on a night bus in central London (around 3:00am near Elephant & Castle). The speaker fell asleep, was tapped and told his phone was stolen, got bus details from the driver but not immediate help. Six to seven months later he received multiple Dropbox photo-upload notifications; the photos (selfies, family, landscapes, mosque, mall) show the device as a Motorola G4 and geotagging/Dropbox location points to Mogadishu, Somalia. He locks the phone out of his Google account but leaves Dropbox active to see more uploads, and begins to reason the phone was shared among a family who periodically come into Mogadishu to upload photos.
Chapters
My phone that got stolen a year ago in central London is in Mogadishu. So, yeah, one day I was going back from work. It was about 3:00am you know, I was getting a night bus back to my flat in Elephant Castle. I was very tired, so I fell asleep on this bus. At some point, you know, I get a tap on the shoulder. Hey, check yourself. And I'm like, what? And this guy's talking to me. He's like, hey, check yourself. You know, somebody was being weird around you. So I'm like, okay. So I'm sure enough, I check myself. My phone's gone. So I go downstairs, I go to the bus driver. I'm just like, did somebody get off the bus recently? Like, you know, somebody just stole my phone. Blah, blah, blah. He's like, okay. Like, somebody just got off the bus. There's not much I can do for you. But here's the bus details, you know, here's the license plate number. You know, give it to the police. It's not my job. So I'm like, okay, great, I'll give it to the police. Six, six, seven months. Hadn't thought about it at all. And then one day, you know, I'm on my computer, just chilling in my flat. A new has been added to your Dropbox. A new photo has been added to your Dropbox. And five. Five notifications pop up saying, a new photo has been added to my Dropbox. I'm like, whoa, what the f. That's weird. And I open it up, and it's a bunch of photos. There's three landscape photos and two selfies. And I'm like, that's strange. You know, I've never met these guys. It says what device the photo was taken with, and it says, taken with a Motorola G4. So I click, you know, locate. You know, the pinpoint on the map feature. A map opens up, map pans to Somalia. Map zooms in. Boom. Mogadishu. My phone is in Mogadishu, Somalia. So I'm like, wow, that's really weird. And I was. I was honestly just confused. You know, I called in my flatmate. I'm like, look at this, man. It says, my phone is in. Is in Mogadishu. Like, I'm not really sure what I should do at this point. So I kind of, like, I lock it out of my Google account because I'm worried that they'll, I don't know, access my emails or my whatever. But I leave the Dropbox thing fine because I'm like, oh, this could this could be really interesting because I've already gotten five photos from these people. And it's. It's weird, but I mean, there's a crazy diversity of these photos. You know, some are selfies, some are guys, like, messing around with each other. Some are pictures of a baby. Some are pictures of what appears to be the mother of the baby. There's some landscapes in one picture. There's a mosque in one picture. There's, like, a mall. My best guess is it's a family sharing the phone because they. They care about each other. So they share everything, including my old phone. So I was like, okay, Mogadishu, right? That's, like, the only location I know, right? So I'm like, okay, it must be a Mogadishu. But when these photos were showing up, it happened in, like, chunks. And the dates didn't really. The dates of the photos didn't really match up with the dates that they were showing up in my Dropbox. So I'm like, huh, that's weird. So what I figured is that, yes, these photos are being uploaded in Mogadishu. They live outside of Mogadishu, and they don't have any Internet. Like, they're in, I don't know, some small village. There's no Internet. So they come into. They come into the city, they come into Mogadishu, they get WI fi or whatever. They access the WI fi and then it uploads them all to my Dropbox. Figuring out where it is in Somalia, right? Important step to that is figuring out how it f cking dots Somalia. How did it go from Elephant Castle in Central London all the way to Somalia?
