Tuk Tuk driver caught stealing Swedish tourist’s phone
A tuk tuk taxi driver was arrested on Saturday in Patong for stealing an iPhone 14 Pro Max from a Swedish tourist in Patong. According to the Patong Police, Merdzana Pepic reported to the police station that she might have forgotten her mobile phone in a Tuk Tuk taxi.
She had taken the tuk tuk taxi earlier in the morning, coming home from Bangla Road to the Patong hotel she was staying in. However, when she arrived at the hotel, she realized that her iPhone 14 Pro Max was missing. She assumed that she must have dropped it or forgotten it in the tuk tuk taxi home.
The Patong Police sprang into action, using a phone tracking mobile app to locate where the iPhone was. They discovered that the mobile phone was on Taweewong Road in Patong and, when they went to the location, police found the Tuk Tuk taxi parked there.
The driver of the tuk tuk arrived at the police waiting for him. Upon searching the tuk tuk taxi, the police found the phone stashed behind the driver’s seat. The driver confessed that he found the dropped iPhone and hid it behind his seat.
He was taken to the Patong Police Station where he will be charged with theft. Meanwhile, Merdzana Pepic was reunited with her iPhone 14 Pro Max and expressed gratitude to the Patong Police for their assistance in retrieving it.
This is not the first time a taxi driver in Patong was shady and grabbed the phone of a foreign passenger. In January, a Kuwaiti tourist went on a scavenger hunt tracing the whereabouts of his mobile phone after a disgruntled taxi driver stole it.
The driver said that his customer spoke badly of his driving and that it so enraged him that he swiped the mobile phone and threw it on Karon Beach. There a foreigner found the phone in the sand while celebrating New Year’s Eve on Karon Beach. He surmised that it was just an abandoned phone, available for the taking, pocketed the phone and went home. Police later tracked down the phone with GPS.
