Apple's AirTag Saved My Bike (Real Theft)

during my first airtag experiment i set out to see how effective the air tags were at recovering lost or stolen items to test this i left three valuable objects in public each with an air tag attached those items were my bike my keys and my wallet unfortunately my wallet was returned to me by a good samaritan and no one was willing to steal my bike during that first attempt the only item which was stolen were the fake car keys which i left on the subway those keys were taken to a city called khalswa which is over 300 kilometers away from where i live after paying a visit to karlsruhe in that last episode i was able to make a connection to the air tag but was ultimately unable to recover the keys now a lot of you slave me in the comments for not having a precision finding capable iphone fair enough well to make it up to you i got myself a secondhand iphone 11 pro and made a second trip back to carl's roar for another shot at recovering those keys and not only that but i continued to leave my bike outside and unlocked every day until someone finally stole the damn thing and steal it they did so let's find out what happened before heading back to karlsruhe i wanted to fully understand how well precision finding works so to test precision finding i took my airtec outside taped it to this tree and started walking backwards the ultra wide band was giving me a measurable distance until i was about 30 meters away or 100 feet now once you go beyond 100 feet you won't get a distance reading anymore but what i discovered is your iphone is actually still holding a constant connection to the tags bluetooth you'll know this if you're still seeing this ring of pixels but once you walk further enough away eventually you'll get a blank screen like this and this means that your iphone isn't connecting with the air tag at all this is great to know because it means when i visit khalsa if i don't get a distance reading but i can see the pixels i know i'm in the right place the problem with the test i've just done is that it's line of sight and since my keys are likely inside of an apartment which has walls flaws and other objects in between those will all weaken the ultra wideband signal so to test it further i left my keys in the center of my 40 square meter flat located on the third story of my apartment complex once i was outside and i approached my apartment i wasn't able to pick up a signal at all i tried walking right up to the apartment and then also walked back a bit but still i wasn't able to pick up anything so i tried again this time leaving the keys on the windowsill and believe it or not still no connection at all so clearly precision finding isn't nearly as effective when you're trying to locate items through walls or buildings regardless of those not so promising results it was time to prepare for the trip back to carlsberg now since my german is pretty rubbish i thought it would be smart to bring my german friend matthias along for the journey so i jumped on deutsche band's website and purchased two super spa price return tickets to khalsa which cost me almost 300 euros what's crazy is we could have flown to spain and back for less than half the price with the tickets purchased matthias and i met at the dusseldorf main station and began our journey to karl's war upon arrival the weather was amazing and i was feeling very optimistic we jumped on the tram and headed east to the air tax location there's the building i'm gonna go get those keys as we need the apartment block i began screen recording and sure enough my iphone made a connection with the stolen keys now i was only able to make this connection in a specific spot on the sidewalk so based on the test i did earlier i was confident i knew which apartment block my keys were in the only problem now was trying to figure out which specific apartment they were in and on which floor and that's where matthias came in after ringing a few of the apartments we finally got a hold of someone matthias briefly explained the situation and asked if we could enter the courtyard it worked we were in now i couldn't recall this part because obviously no one would like being recorded on their own property but what happened was as we got inside several of the residents were out chatting in the courtyard all of them said they hadn't seen the keys whatsoever when we explained which apartment we thought the keys might be in they told us those neighbors were out at the moment but they allowed me to walk up and down the stairs to see if i could pick up a signal from the outside and i was really confident i would but weirdly enough i wasn't able to pick up a signal from the other side of the building at all really strange at this point matthias and i had no choice but to thank the residents for letting us in and had to resort to plan b so we popped into a local printing store and printed out some missing key pamphlets we left a bunch of them in the mailbox of the apartment block we knew the keys were in and we also planted a bunch all over the area to make sure whoever had them knew we were coming for them honestly at this point i was pretty gutted that i'd spent well over a thousand euros trying to recover some fake car keys and was unsuccessful in doing so so to cheer ourselves up we popped into a local brewery and had ourselves a well-deserved schnitzel and cold german bear as you can see it was amazing the meal itself made the trip worth every cent kinda once i had a right back and dissed it off i couldn't help but do one last test with precision finding i placed my ear tags in the middle of my flat again and tried to see if i could get a signal from right outside my door the distance from the air attack to the entrance of my flat was no more than 6 meters or 20 feet away and with only one wall and the door in between yet even from the short distance i couldn't get a connection at all so the fact that i was able to make a connection in carl's roar just goes to show how close i must have been to my keys so what's the takeaway here well although precision finding works really well at locating items within your home it's highly ineffective when walls and doors are in between you and your air tag you'll need to get extremely close in order for it to work and honestly i think in my case i just got really lucky even though i didn't find the keys where i could see precision finding coming in handy is if you lost your keys in an open area like a field or a park it would definitely make finding your keys a lot quicker and a lot easier but as soon as your air tech goes inside of someone else's property it's unlikely you'll be able to get a reading from outside just something to keep in mind now several days after the trip to khalsa something very interesting happened for the first time since the keys were stolen whoever had them decided to take them for a drive the keys were taken to carl's roar central station so i thought okay here we go the person saw my pamphlet and now they're going to hand it in to the lost and found but whoever had the keys just walked up and down the platform for five minutes and then just headed back home like okay what was the point of that at this point i almost feel as though the person knows i'm tracking them and is just trolling me so obviously not the outcome we all wanted but we came pretty close now let's move on to the bike story as i said in my intro after failing to have my bike stolen the first time around i decided i would leave my bike outside and unlocked every day until the damn thing was stolen i left my bike unlocked at the park supermarket restaurant no matter where i took it it was always right where i left it and i must say not having to worry about locking my bike everywhere i went was so liberating i could just walk out of my flat jump on my bike and take off to the supermarket without having to fidget around with locks it was awesome but after 11 days of doing this reality finally kicked in and someone stole my bike so i parked the bike here yesterday and now it's gone now according to the find my app the last known location of the bike was just a few blocks away from where i live and was last located at 10 pm the previous night so it had been about 12 hours since it was last located not a good sign but later that day i got a second ping alert in the exact same location so i ran like crazy to see if i could figure out where it was and it turned out to be in some kind of gated housing community with security at the gate so i approached the security explained the situation and asked if i could have a look around they were very friendly spoke to me in english and even offered to escort me around to help me try find the bike but after walking around for about 15 minutes and failing to find the bike i had to call it quits and go home empty-handed two days had passed and finally hadn't received any more pings so i was starting to lose hope but the next day i got an alert and i could see that the bike had left the housing community and was being taken for a ride now since there was only one place to enter and exit that gated housing community i decided to go there and wait for the thief to return while i was waiting near the gate i received a notification from find my informing me that my bike was about 800 meters away 10 minutes later and it was pinked in the exact same location again so whoever had it must have parked it there i was a little skeptical about leaving the area in case i missed the thief coming back but i just couldn't help myself so i bolted it to the new location important note i didn't have my precision finding compatible iphone yet once i'd arrived to where the pin was i couldn't see my bike yet but when i checked to find my app i could see my iphone had made a connection to the air tag it was close by and sure enough i looked to my right and i could see my bike no way bam they ditched the bike and i found it that's insane [Music] no way incredible it had been abandoned next to a building honestly i was over the moon i'd finally recovered a lost item and i could say it was thanks to the ear tag good job apple so if you were to ask me are the air tags effective at helping you recover loss of stolen valuables well from my experience absolutely now i know i wasn't able to recover the keys in karlsruhe but you can't deny that the air tag greatly increased my odds of a potential recovery i was likely within 10 to 20 feet of my keys and if i didn't have my air tag well i wouldn't have even known that the keys were in cars were let alone which apartment block it was in so if you have valuables you want to protect heck yeah i recommend it it works really well now i'm sure a lot of you are wanting to know what happened to the ear tags which i sent to elon musk tim cook and north korea while that video is still in the works unfortunately i can only work as fast as dhl can deliver but i can say some very interesting stuff has been going on in the background and i can't wait to share it with you guys and if you haven't seen that video yet be sure to check it out it's pretty interesting thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: MegaLag

Views: 2,089,386

Keywords: AirTag, AirTags, Bike, Theft, Thief, Apple

Id: e3zMWWG9W14

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021