Los Angeles-based documentary film producer and cinematographer Erroll Webber had film equipment go missing from his luggage in Anchorage. Before checking bags on his United flight he stuck an Apple AirTags on one of the equipment bags.
Webber’s bag made it, he says, without the film equipment. But he was able to track it to the perpetrator’s house.
Hey @united, one of your employees at Anchorage Airport rummaged through my luggage and took some film equipment home with them. They inadvertently took my Apple AirTag that I had hidden.
Can you tell your employee who lives at: 210 Clover Hollow Court to give me my stuff back? pic.twitter.com/duwDAm0Igi
— Errol Webber (@ErrolWebber) November 1, 2022
While the former congressional candidate who sought to unseat Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) in a non-partisan primary this summer assumes it’s a United Airlines employee who took the valuable items, that’s actually unclear. TSA, baggage contractor and airport employees may have had access to the bags as well. However it’s not difficult to determine residents at the address the AirTag tracks to. Hopefully he’s reported to the police in addition to sharing on social media (and hopefully Anchorage police haven’t quiet quit the way officers in Austin have, here they seem unlikely to respond to such a report).
AirTags are the new way to track down errant luggage. About six weeks ago another photographer tracked down his bags, which were taken at baggage claim with the chase ultimately taking him to a Miami home at 1 a.m. It used to be much harder to catch baggage thiefs, usually relying only on their own stupidity to unearth them – like when a TSA screener got caught stealing a CNN camera when he tried to sell it on eBay. He got caught because he forgot to remove some of the CNN stickers before the sale, and argued that TSA culture not only permitted but even encouraged baggage theft.
