ORLANDO, Fla. — A Central Florida businessman said when his $20,000 trailer was stolen from him last month, he thought it would never be found.
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Investigators seemed to not have any leads on who stole it for weeks.
But the man told Channel 9 a $30 device and a ping on his phone led him to crack the case himself.
Mohammad Karbasion says it’s all thanks to an Apple AirTag that he has his trailer back.
Karbasion says he uses the trailer daily for debris when he’s renovating houses. In mid-December, he left his trailer locked on a carport at a job site in Orlando overnight.
Read: Airtags: How to protect yourself from unwanted tracking devices
“On December 12, it was parked. The next day, December 13th, It was gone,” Karbasion said.
He filed a report on his missing $20,000 trailer with Orlando Police Department that same day. For weeks, he says he heard nothing.
He was hopeless.
That was until after he bought a new trailer this month. He was adding trackers to it and found a ping on Find my iPhone.
The AirTag had pinged at an Apopka address days before.
Karbasion decided he would do his own investigation and drove out to Anton Avenue in Apopka where the AirTag pinged.
Low and behold, he found a trailer that looked identical to his.
Orange County Sheriff’s Office went out to the property Sunday but said they couldn’t search the property yet.
“I was shocked because like, it can be gone tomorrow, like I see my $20,000 thing sitting there. You guys don’t do anything? And he said no, you got to get the search warrant,” Karbasion said.
The sheriff’s office said they didn’t have enough probable cause to search for the trailer until Monday afternoon. That’s when deputies found the trailer and several other stolen vehicles on the property.
Read: ‘Extremely unsettling’: Consumer claims portable tracker found in car he just bought
Deputies were able to return one trailer to it’s rightful owner.
“I was so lucky I guess… lucky because I shouldn’t be able to find this trailer to be honest with you,” Karbasion said.
He never thought the AirTag would stay with the trailer. He placed it there as “bait” for thieves if the trailer was ever stolen. That’s because he had another magnetic tracker hidden on the trailer. His logic was that the thieves wouldn’t search for a second tracker if they found one.
But that hidden tracker died and luckily, the thieves never found the AirTag hidden in plain sight.
“I don’t know how they didn’t see it. Nobody saw it,” he said.
The sheriff’s office would not say if anyone was arrested. The agency says it’s still an active and open investigation.
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