What are the odds? Hong Kong woman has iPhone 14 Pro stolen by taxi driver, encounters same car with new cabby days later
- Woman realises her phone was still in taxi just after getting out but claims driver sped away when she tried to retrieve it
- When she hailed a taxi days later at exact location she was picked up by same car driven by another person
Against all odds, a lucky Hong Kong woman encountered the same taxi more than a week after leaving her HK$10,000 (US$1,300) iPhone 14 Pro in it.
The woman, named Tung Tung, posted in a Hong Kong lost and found Facebook group that she left her iPhone in a taxi in Kam Tin in the New Territories, a northern region in the city, on July 7, according to a local news site.
She said she realised that her phone was still in the car just after she got out but claimed the driver, on seeing her try to signal for him to stop, accelerated and quickly drove away.
Tung Tung said her phone had already been switched off when she called her number five minutes later.
Posting on the same day that she lost the phone, Tung Tung said she messaged the driver pleading with him to return the phone which held important content.
After more than a week, Tung Tung had given up on seeing her phone again. On July 16 when she hailed a taxi at the exact location she got the same vehicle in which she left her phone but it was driven by a different driver.
The cabby said the previous driver who drove off with her phone was covering his shift that day.
He called the first driver for Tung Tung and found out that he had already sold her phone to a shop in mainland China for 600 yuan (US$85) but offered to pay her HK$1,000 (US$128) in compensation.
Tung Tung said she recorded this conversation and asked for the first driver to return her phone, otherwise, she would call the police.
The man panicked and promised to retrieve her phone and return it to her the following week.
Tung Tung said the dishonest driver told her he sold phones to the same shop every time he found one and that he could ask the owner not to sell her phone before he retrieved it.
“He could have just asked me for HK$1,000, but he sold it for 600 yuan,” she said.
However, many who read Tung Tung’s post did not believe the driver had sold it at the price he claimed.
Although HK01 reported her saying the second driver had contacted her on the day when she was supposed to get her phone back and said the culprit had brought her phone back to Hong Kong, she updated her post saying she still had not received her phone and had reported to the police.
“Even if I’m unable to recover my phone, I don’t want to see another person fall victim to him,” she wrote in her updated post.
