How far would you go to retrieve a pair of AirPods you dropped on a bus?
For 21-year-old Matthias, the answer was an $18 Grab ride to Sentosa, a trek across Palawan Beach and a “pretty insane” 1.5-hour chase that eventually led him to the man who allegedly picked them up.
To be fair, the $180 AirPods were only two days old.
Matt, who is currently serving his National Service with the Singapore Police Force, documented part of the pursuit on TikTok, joking: “When people say there’s nothing to do in Singapore but all you need is to track the person who stole your AirPods.”
“Walked through the trenches of Sentosa’s two beaches for this,” he captioned the clip, adding the hashtags #thief, #findmy and #iwillfindyou.
The video shows Matt on a Sentosa tram, checking the Find My app on a phone. Just a couple of rows ahead is a man Matt suspected of having his AirPods, with a red arrow pointing towards him.
Speaking to 8days.sg, Matt says the incident happened on Oct 11, when he was travelling from Somerset to Changi City Point and took bus 123 to Fort Canning MRT station.
It was only after boarding the train that he reached for his AirPods and realised they were gone.
He immediately opened Find My, which showed them back at Fort Canning. Thinking he had left them at the MRT station, Matt and his friend headed back.
But the AirPods’ location kept changing.
Realising they were likely still on bus 123, which was heading towards Beach Station in Sentosa, the pair booked a Grab there in hopes of beating the bus.
They made it in time and searched the bus with the driver’s help, but couldn’t find the AirPods despite Find My showing they were nearby.
The pair even checked another bus 123, thinking they might have followed the wrong one.
Then the AirPods’ location suddenly moved to Palawan Beach.
By then, Matt was ready to give up and buy another pair. His friend, however, wasn’t.
“My friend insisted to give chase as it was just not right for someone to just take what doesn’t belong to them like that,” says Matt. Besides, they had already spent $18 on a Grab ride to Sentosa and were so close.
So off they went, following Find My up and down Palawan Beach in outfits and footwear that “weren’t made for the beach”.
Matt recalls them “trying not to roll down the beach”, joking that they probably looked suspicious to whoever had his AirPods.
When the location moved back towards Palawan West, Matt’s friend spotted two men in the distance around where Find My indicated the AirPods were.
Matt and his friend followed the men onto a tram back to Beach Station.
Instead of confronting them immediately, they wanted to make sure they had the right people.
Matt used Find Nearby and the Play Sound function, which triggers an alarm on the AirPods, and “lo and behold, it started ringing loudly”.
The sound was coming from inside one of the men’s bags.
Matt says the alarm was “blaring loudly” throughout the tram, yet the men “didn’t even bat an eye”.
At Beach Station, Matt confronted the men and asked if they had picked up a pair of AirPods on bus 123, initially giving them the benefit of the doubt. The man denied having them, claims Matt.
So Matt sounded the alarm again — and it rang from inside his bag.
“He then acted surprised as though he had a realisation or that he forgot he took an AirPods from the seat of bus 123 and started rummaging through his bag for it,” says Matt.
After Matt sounded the alarm once more, the man pulled out the AirPods and returned them. Even his companion appeared surprised that he had picked them up, says Matt.
“I don’t know why I thanked him but I think at that point I just wanted my AirPods back…” says Matt.
He did not make a police report, as he had initially believed he had simply misplaced his AirPods.
Thankfully, his AirPods came with a charging case with a built-in speaker — a feature Matt says he deliberately opted for because he has lost his AirPods before.
“Without the speaker on the [case], it would be difficult to locate it even on Find My,” he says.