A pickpocket steals Veronica de Souza's iPhone while she waits for the train in New York. When she realizes it's gone, she goes home, remotely wipes it, and reports it as lost.
The next day she buys a new iPhone. "As long as I didn't remove the phone from my Apple account or the Find My app," she writes in the piece for The Gothamist, "the phone was essentially bricked to anyone without the passcode and my iCloud password — unusable by the thieves, or the fences who I assume bought it from them. Now my phone was their problem."
Over the next few weeks, she receives a "series of texts from someone cycling through a number of different strategies for engaging, convincing, tricking or scaring me into unlocking the phone for them.
She has some fun playing with the thief. When they contact her through Messages, she replies, "Good luck!"
In a last-ditch effort, the desperate thief resorts to a well-known copypasta threat, but de Souza simply ignores it.
Previously: One of the wildest and coolest stolen phone stories of all time
