A bar? A church? China? A stolen iPhone's baffling journey around the globe

A stolen iPhone's 8,000-mile journey illustrates how demand in China for secondhand phones and their parts is helping to fuel a surge in robberies in the U.S.

Thomas Baker knew something was wrong the moment he felt his back pocket. He was at a bar in Charlotte, North Carolina, watching an NFL game with some friends. Around 11:15 p.m., he realized he had been pickpocketed — his iPhone stolen right out of his jeans.

When Baker, 24, got home, he logged into his iCloud account and marked the phone as lost. To his surprise, he was able to track it on the Find My app as it moved down the East Coast — first to South Carolina, then Florida, Tennessee and ultimately all the way to China.

The phone’s 8,000-mile journey around the world wasn’t even the strangest thing about the ordeal. It was the location in downtown Miami where the stolen phone appeared to have been kept for several days.

At 1:38 a.m. on Jan. 28, 10 days after it had been taken from him in Charlotte, the device first pinged from Christ Fellowship Downtown.

“I couldn’t believe it — a church?” said Baker, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina this spring. “It’s just the most bizarre thing.”