Dutch Student Lets a Thief Steal His Smartphone and Shoots a Documentary about Looking for It

Dutch student Anthony van der Meer released a documentary that he made after letting the thief to steal his smartphone: he has been tracking the criminal for two weeks and turned the search mission into a short movie, which had over 4.5 million views in several days.

The author says that he got the idea for the movie after his iPhone was stolen in one of the Amsterdam cafes. When he discovered that the phone was missing, he immediately reported it to the police, but by that time the thief has already gotten rid of the SIM card and switched off the Internet — the stolen phone was impossible to find.

This inspired van der Meer for his own investigation of what happens to stolen smartphones. For this, he bought a new phone: this time not iPhone, but an HTC, which works on Android, and therefore allows for installing Cerberus, a spying software that enables remote control of the phone, obtaining geolocation data, having access to all files, and secretly using the camera and the microphone.

After several days of walking around the city and the attempts to find a ‘victim’ — the thief who would steal the device, van der Meer succeeded. This time, he could track the movement of the criminal, his phone conversations and messages.

“The more data I collected from the thief, the more sympathy I got for him,” the author says about the criminal. “I got the feeling I really got to know him. I didn’t think the thief seemed like a standard criminal at all. I even started to feel sorry for him: I thought he was a sad and lonely man.”