[Jim Layne]

Police came to my house saying a stolen iPad had been tracked to my house. After checking the serial number on our iPad and verifying it was not the stolen device, the police were not satisfied that we did not have the stolen device. They phoned the person (call him the "victim") who reported their iPad stolen and asked him to turn on the sound function to see if we could hear it.

An amazing thing happened. The victim said "Oops. I hear it here at our house." They located it under some stuff. The police acknowledged that it had been found and was not stolen. They apologized for bothering us and said maybe we could check with Apple to see how the registrations could be confused

Oh, forget to mention that when they first came into our house, they read us our "Miranda rights"! Needless to say, my wife and I, both senior citizens, were quite disturbed.

My questions are - how can this happen when we live several miles from the "victim's" home? Can GPS be that wrong? And, how can I check with Apple about confused registrations? Sorry for the length of this post.

[iOS Gravity]

Just give Apple a call. This is indeed very strange.

[anon(4698833)]

If this story is true, you should file a grievance against your local PD...there are a few details about this story that reek of a certain aroma to me though...

- Miranda Rights are not read to people who answer their door to the police...these are read to people in police custody. If you truly experienced this, you should report them.
- A warrant would be required to do any and ALL of the things you listed the police did in this scenario. Without a warrant, your amended rights were completely aborted.
- A person calling the police and telling them their iPad is showing up at someone's address is not grounds enough to carry out any of the activities you described.

...now maybe you were just truly victims of a very odd and unlikely circumstance, or some very shoddy and invasive police activity...but to be honest, what I've ready so far seems so far fetched I have a hard time believing it at all. Location services on i-devices are prone to errors (especially when using cellular towers for tracking purposes)...you can have errors of as much as several miles, depending on the strength and location of network origination...and even placing those things aside, sometimes location services are just inaccurate in the way the GPS system calculates them.

I also have to say that the story seems odd in the sense that I ready a story almost identical to this quite some time ago on CNet (only reflective of a stolen iPhone)...with nearly identical circumstances.