Find My glitch may be sending strangers to one home

A Reddit user says strangers have been turning up at their home for 3–4 years, convinced their missing iPhone, iPad, or a friend’s phone is inside. According to the post, the first incident happened when two men arrived after an iPhone was reportedly stolen the night before and Apple’s Find My led them to the house.

The device was not there, but the visits kept coming. The user wrote that there have since been at least four or five more cases of people arriving with a device in hand and insisting, “My phone is here.” They also said the situation feels unsafe: the household is made up of two women, and they worry that an angry stranger could escalate the confrontation.

Some Reddit commenters suggested it could be a scam or an attempt to gain access to the property. Others pointed to a more mundane explanation: location data that is only approximate but appears precise enough to send frustrated device owners to the wrong address.

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This would not be the first case like it. TechRadar notes a similar report from 2013, and points to a 2016 investigation by the Reply All podcast into a nearly identical situation in Atlanta, GA. In that case, the podcast traced the issue to a “digital desert”: one of the few homes in the area had a router that nearby devices could detect, causing lost phones without usable GPS data to appear centered on that property.

A similar quirk could be at work here. While Find My primarily uses Bluetooth and nearby Apple devices to estimate a lost phone’s position, Reddit users suggested two other possibilities:

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• stolen devices are being brought near the house and send a final approximate ping before being disassembled or switched off
• the home’s Wi-Fi network is being logged as the device’s last known location because its signal is strong nearby

One suggested fix was to add _nomap to the home network’s SSID. But as one commenter noted, if the property happens to sit at a default point for local IP address mapping, there may be very little the residents can do.