Man who found — and sold — the missing iPhone unmasked

[Blue_Tires]

Source: Yahoo

Twenty-one-year-old Redwood City, California, resident Brian J. Hogan, the man identified by Wired.com as the guy who found — and later sold — Apple's missing iPhone in a bar last month, has a message for Apple, the engineer who originally lost the precious gadget, and the tech world at large: Sorry about that.

Following a trail of "clues" on social-networking sites and confirming his ID with a source "involved in the iPhone find," Wired named Hogan on Thursday as the bar patron who made off with Apple's top-secret iPhone prototype and then sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000 after an Apple software engineer left the precious phone on a bar stool.

Up until now, Hogan's identity has been a mystery to the public, but the 21-year-old college student (or at least, he was a college student as of 2008) may have sensed that he was in trouble after all the hoopla over Gizmodo's gigantic iPhone scoop last week and the subsequent fallout, including a raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's house by San Mateo sheriff's deputies armed with a search warrant.

Hogan has now lawyered up, and in a statement released through his attorney, the young man says he "regrets his mistake in not doing more to return the phone," and that he thought his $5,000 deal with Gizmodo was only "so that they could review the phone," Wired reports.

According to Hogan's attorney's statement, Hogan didn't see the lost iPhone until another patron at the Redwood City bar came up and asked him if it was his; Hogan apparently then asked a few other patrons if they'd lost the device before heading out, iPhone in hand, according to Wired.

Initial reports had it that the man who'd taken the iPhone tried repeatedly to call the Apple Care support line to return the phone, but according to the statement in the Wired story, Hogan never personally called Apple, although a friend of his offered to. The owners of the bar where the iPhone was lost also told Wired that Hogan never bothered to call them about the lost hardware, although the anguished Apple engineer who mislaid the iPhone "returned several times" to see if it had turned up.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_gadg/ytech_gadg_tc1874

[Historic NY]

1. Possession & sale of stolen property...its not finders keepers...

he knew exactly what he was doing.

[customerserviceguy]

2. Frankly, I think this whole thing is a fraud

Apple's gotten a lot of free publicity out of this. It reeks of a trick to try to gin up excitement for the next generation of overpriced toy.

[RandomThoughts]

3. And it seems to follow a certain narrative. So it could be a made up story.

Although I never got into the mobile phone craze, I don't like using phones, I like talking to people in person, or fun posts on forums.

[customerserviceguy]

5. And I'm not a Luddite when it comes to these things

Late last year, I ditched my cheap candy-bar phone for a smartphone, and I do love using it for all kinds of things. It's just that I paid a reasonable price for it, and didn't have to act like a cult follower to obtain it.

It's like my networking professor said years ago, when the Windows-Linux debate was heating up, "It's an operating system, not a religion!"

[Blue_Tires]

4. Well I certainly agree that at face value

many of the 'facts' in the official story don't pass the smell test...

For instance, if the thief was smart enough to know that Gawker was willing to pay $5000, he had to have known one of Apple's corporate rivals would have EASILY paid ten or twenty times that amount to get it, and Apple themselves probably would have paid even more to get it back...

[customerserviceguy]

6. The first fact is that the thing even got out there

A bit more than three years ago, I worked for a semiconductor factory, and I know how damned secure they made everything. A high-tech company like Apple didn't get prosperous by using loose security practices.

[Blue_Tires]

7. That, too...

A lot of this just doesn't seem to add up...

[onehandle]

9. It's well documented that Apple employees field test iPhones as their personal phones.

This is not the first time that a unit has gotten away. In fact some have ended up on eBay, but always units with already released features. It is the first time one was stolen, then new features revealed with such great detail by one of the story hungry tech blogs.

And again, it was not a publicity stunt. Apple gets all the free publicity it wants with a phone call.

[onehandle]

8. LOL! Apple does't need publicity like this. They're the most profitable consumer electronics company

...in history. They have 'events' for their publicity and every tech reporter in the world comes to report on it.

It was theft.

Also. The unit was a prototype. Prototypes frequently have features that will not be released in the next iteration. If there is a single feature that is not on June's iPhone, they could lose sales.