A Florida mother was horrified to find out that her son was being tracked through the use of an Apple AirTag, but a police investigation found there was a simple and harmless explanation.
Jackie Giurleo told WOFL-TV that she was alerted about the tracking device after her family attended a Christmas parade in Satellite Beach. When they returned home, the mom started getting notifications from her phone that there was an AirTag tracker in her vicinity.
The map of the tracker shown on the phone appeared to be following her son, Aidan.
“I go a lot of places,” the 7-year-old told WOFL.
Giurleo was alarmed by the discovery because she didn’t own any AirTags, so the natural assumption was that someone else was tracking her son.
“It was every mother’s worst nightmare,” she said.
She searched through his toys and clothes in order to try to find the tracker, and then she looked in the foam of his shoes.
“When we found it, my heart just dropped. Honestly, my knees gave out because it was inside my son’s shoe,” Giurleo said.
It was in a small cavity that was cut into the foam. She went to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office with the tracker to file a report, and they started an investigation. Police issued a subpoena to Apple to get the address of the owner of the AirTag, and then they found the real owner of the shoes.
A happy coincidence
It turned out that Aidan had accidentally swapped his shoes with another boy’s shoes when they took them off to go into a bounce house at the Christmas parade. Aidan said that he remembered noticing that another boy had the exact same shoes as he did.
“I think we put them in the same places, and then we just swapped,” he said.
The other family from Oklahoma had put the tracker in order to keep track of their own child. Giurleo said she was surprised to learn that AirTags could be used to monitor people.
“We have never had AirTags,” she said. “I knew about them with luggage and keys and things like that. I never thought about them when it came to tracking your kids.”
She said she was relieved that the explanation for the bizarre incident was innocent.
“Luckily, it just turned into a happy coincidence of a tale of two moms,” she added. “We were really lucky that we had a happy ending.”
Here’s a local news report about the incident:
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