A Gurugram woman reportedly used her smartwatch to track down the man who snatched her phone and managed to retrieve the device by punching him in the head.
The snatching occurred last month, according to a Hindustan Times report, when Pallavi Kaushik was using her smartphone to complete a transaction at a shop. An FIR in the matter was only registered on Monday and the thief has yet to be arrested, police said.
Kaushik, 28, is a resident of Sector 23, Palam Vihar in Gurugram. On August 28, she was using her phone to pay a merchant while grocery shopping at Huda market. She told police that a man kept peering over her shoulder as she paid the bill using UPI. He then suddenly snatched her phone and ran.
Even though Kaushik screamed for help, none of the bystanders reacted. She started chasing the man herself, following him for around 200m before he managed to get away.
Kaushik then used her smartwatch to track her phone’s location. The smartwatch kept beeping to indicate that her phone was nearby. The 28-year-old woman wandered the bylanes of Sector 23 for about three hours until she managed to track down her phone’s exact location.
According to the Hindustan Times report, police said that Kaushik saw the phone thief using her device while sitting on a motorcycle. “I panicked after losing my phone as it had all my contacts and work-related important data. Thus, I kept wandering the bylanes till 9.15pm in an attempt to track him with help of the watch. I finally spotted him sitting on a motorcycle parked on the corner of a narrow lane,” she said.
Kaushik creeped up on the phone thief from behind and punched him hard in the head. She also tried to overpower him. “He tried to break free and my phone fell from his hands. He fled, leaving my phone behind. I picked it up and returned home. The next day, I submitted a complaint at the Palam Vihar police station,” she said.
During the three hours that he had possession of Kaushik’s phone, the man used her UPI pin to transfer Rs 50,865 out of her bank account. On the basis of her complaint, an FIR has been registered under sections 379 (theft), 379A (snatching) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.
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