Remember that story about the iPhone 5 prototype being lost in a bar? Well, the San Francisco Police Department is saying that it doesn’t have any record of this happening.
The original CNET story cited anonymous sources which said an Apple employee lost the prototype at a San Francisco bar, the San Francisco police helped Apple track it down to a man’s house in the city and questioned some people about it. It was kind of humorous because last year’s iPhone 4 was also lost in a bar a few months before it was officially introduced and it immediately spawned a bunch of “Apple employees like to drink” jokes.
The SF Weekly spoke with an SFPD spokesperson who said that the department has no record of any sort of investigation. If the SF police did go to the man’s home to question him over this lost iPhone 5, it would definitely have a record of it, the spokesperson said.
So, it’s either a super duper conspiracy where Apple can keep these things off the record, the San Francisco police bungled the records or the story is off. I’m leaning toward the last one because if an iPhone 5 prototype was out in the wild, I’m sure we would have seen at least a picture of it by now. Of course, we did hear reports last time that Apple has its own security force that was actively investigating the lost iPhone 4 in the field, so elements of this story could still be true.
What do you think, friends?
[Update] There’s an explosive story on SF Weekly which says that Apple may have impersonated the San Francisco Police Department in its quest to retrieve the lost iPhone 5 prototype. The paper interviewed Sergio Calderon, the man who reportedly found the device and was confronted by what he says is Apple security:
Calderón said that at about 6 p.m. six people — four men and two women — wearing badges of some kind showed up at his door. “They said, ‘Hey, Sergio, we’re from the San Francisco Police Department.'” He said they asked him whether he had been at Cava 22 over the weekend (he had) and told him that they had traced a lost iPhone to his home using GPS.
He then let them search his house and car for the device and he even says that they made threats about immigration status, even though Calderon is an American. One of the people gave Calderon a number to contact and they said they would give him money for the device “no questions asked.” SF Weekly called the number provided and it was Anthony Colon, who said he is an Apple employee and has “senior investigator” at Apple on his LinkedIn page.
Remember, if this is true, Apple security may have committed a criminal act by posing as law enforcement. Yowza.