Army families have to go through multiple ‘permanent change of station’ (PCS) during service and at times their belongings take a lot longer to arrive at their new homes. Horrified by the PCSing move stories, an army wife, Valerie McNulty, used an AirTag to track her belongings and keep an eye on her shady mover.
Apple’s compact tracker, AirTag is designed to locate lost items via the iPhone’s Find My app and its global Find My network. The tracker gives the precise location of the items that a YouTuber was able to track a moving parcel sent to overseas destinations, the CEO of a cybersecurity firm located and retrieved his stolen bike, and a lawyer caught a city contractor who was illegally dumping personal belongings of homeless people in Portland, Ore.
An army wife used AirTag to track her belongings during a PCS from Colorado to New York
On their fourth PCS, Valerie McNulty slipped in an AirTag in one of the boxes before loading them on the mover’s truck. After the delivery did not arrive on the expected date, McNulty contacted the move coordinator, Suddath, who told her that the HHG will be delivered the next day.
But not taking the coordinator’s word, she opened the Find My app on her iPhone to locate her AirTag and found that her mover was only four hours away from her location in Elizabeth, New Jersey. MilitaryTimes writes that she caught the mover who was deliberately delaying the delivery.
So, McNulty said was surprised a short time later when she received a call from the driver who told her he had just picked up the HHG in Colorado and a next-day delivery was impossible. When she confronted the unnamed driver about being just a few hours away, he hung up on her, she said.
“I made him aware that I knew he was only four hours away from us,” she noted. “He called back several minutes later trying to bargain with me to see if he could deliver it on Sunday or Monday.”
Afterwards, McNulty attempted to raise alarms with Suddath, but the company was reportedly unaware of the driver’s location. “At this point, I had more information than they did all because of my AirTag,” she said.
In the aftermath of the whole PCS, McNulty was happy that she took the matter into her own hands by tracking her belongings and AirTag gave her the exact location of her HHG until it arrived.
Recently, several news reports on the use of AirTags for stalking and stealing cars gave Apple’s tracker bad coverage but it is incidents like these that show that items are not good or bad, their usage is.
