This is the type of story that can only happen in one place, you guessed it, Silicon Valley California. In Santa Clara, thieves have recently been apprehended when they stole hundreds of high tech GPS tracking devices by mistake.
The Santa Clara tech company advised that the specialist GPS equipment looks exactly like phone batteries, so they assume the thieves believed they had some sort of street value. Of course, the devices were worth over $18,000 so it may have been a good haul for the thieves, but would the burglary have been made if they had known they were tracking devices? We would like to think not.
Roambee Corporation immediately realized that the thieves had unwittingly stolen a box of high-grade trackers, their co-founder Subramanian notified the police and they went into recovery mode. Setting the trackers to high alert, the thieves were located in a matter of minutes. With the tracking devices providing their exact location, the police were able to swoop in and return the stolen goods.
And the case was open, shut and closed in the space of a couple hours: not only were the thieves tracked, but they also grabbed beers from the company fridge on their way out. In their hurried attempt to leave the premises one of them cut themselves, leaving blood and fingerprints on the scene.
The GPS pinpointed the thieves stash house location to the police, who were able to raid the property: finding more stolen goods and drugs in the process. In fact, some of the devices had gone mobile but the technology was so good, the police were able to locate them driving around the East Bay.
The Roambee devices are actually intended to track shipments of bananas around the world, and not made for fighting crime at all, but on this occasion, they definitely pulled through!
