From Wired:

"Police closed in on the man who found and sold a prototype 4G iPhone after his roommate called an Apple security official and turned him in, according to a newly unsealed document in the ongoing police investigation.

The tip sent police racing to the home of 21-year-old Brian Hogan, and began a strange scavenger hunt for evidence that a friend of Hogan’s had scattered around the Silicon Valley community of Redwood City. Police recovered a desktop computer stashed inside an area church, a thumb drive hidden in a bush alongside the road, and the iPhone’s serial number stickers from the parking lot of a gas station."

And...

"Apple discovered Hogan’s identity as the iPhone finder the day Gizmodo’s story broke, after Rick Orloff, directory of information security at the company, received a phone call from one of Hogan’s two roommates, Katherine Martinson. She told Apple that Hogan had found the phone and had been offering it to news outlets in exchange for a payment, despite having identified Powell as the rightful owner from a Facebook page visible on the phone’s display when he found it.

“Sucks for him,” Hogan allegedly told Martinson about Powell. “He lost his phone. Shouldn’t have lost his phone.”

Martinson turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. “Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility,” according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.

Police were preparing a search warrant affidavit for Hogan’s apartment two days later, when Martinson phoned them to report that Hogan and a second roommate, Thomas Warner, were in the process of removing evidence from their Redwood City apartment: a desktop computer, stickers from the iPhone, a thumb drive and a memory card. Police raced to the apartment, but by the time they arrived, Hogan and Warner had left in separate cars with the evidence."


Sounds like the act of a guy who found a phone carelessly left behind. /Sarcasm

Anyway:
"it’s generally considered theft under California law if one “finds lost property under circumstances that give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner” and yet appropriates the property for his own use “without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him.”


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ommate-iphone/