iPhones are one of the most commonly stolen mobile devices according to crime statistics. But for 31-year-old Horatio Toure, he found out you better hope the iPhone you steal isn’t a test for a new type of tracking software.

He found this out the hard way after allegedly stealing the phone from Jordan Sturm, an assistant to Covia Labs CEO David Kahn. Kahn was at the company’s San Francisco office providing a demo of his company’s latest software, Alert & Respond. To simulate how it worked in real life situations, he asked Sturm to take his phone on a walk around the block.

This may have been a little more than they were bargaining for.

According to police, shortly after Sturm left the bulding Toure rode by on his bicycle and snatched the phone from the young woman. Seeing the phone moving at a high rate of speed down the street must have intially made Kahn thing it was malfunctioning, but it was actually Toure pedaling as fast as he could from the scene of the crime. Sturm ran back into the building and alerted her boss as well as the police as to what had just happened.

Police stayed on the line with Sturm as she relayed the position given by the device. It took police about ten minutes to finally track Toure down, who was arrested for grand theft and possession of stolen property.

Alert & Respond apparently has other capabilities such as remote microphone activation and picture taking, but Kahn said they didn’t want to give the robber any clue of how he was being tracked.

“What are the odds that you would grab someone’s cell phone during a demonstration of the ability to track the phone’s location in real time?” he told SFGate.com. Maybe Toure doesn’t know of the Ten Commandments: one of them being “thou shalt not steal.”

 
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