Man arrested for tracking girlfriend by attaching Apple Watch to her car

Lawrence Welch, a 29-year-old from Nashville in the US, has been charged with attaching an electronic tracking device to a vehicle, according to an affidavit.

Apple recently had to upgrade its AirTags with more security and anti-stalking features after people began using them to snoop on people and commit criminal offences. Little did Apple know that miscreants could turn the Apple Watch into a stalking device. A man from Nashville, Tennessee in the US has been arrested for using an Apple Watch to track the location of his girlfriend. He attached the Apple Watch to the wheel of his girlfriend’s car and used a third-party tracking app to keep a check on her whereabouts.

Lawrence Welch, 29-year-old, has been charged with attaching an electronic tracking device to a vehicle, according to an affidavit. As reported by WSMV4, police arrived at a Family Safety Center in response to a call from security who told them that the boyfriend of the victim had showed up there. Meanwhile, an order of protection was being arranged for the victim. The victim claimed that Welch had made threats to kill multiple times and that she had been visiting the Safety Center for a while.

Welch was able to track her because of an app called Life360. The victim told police that she and her boyfriend Welch used Life360 to monitor each other's location but she turned off the tracking on the app before attending Family Safety Centers previously. On occasions like these, she said she was bombarded with texts by her boyfriend asking her to send her location to him and to call him back.

The police said that after reaching the Family Service Center, Welch crouched by one of the wheels instead of heading toward the building. With suspicion, officers approached him and spotted an Apple Watch attached to the spokes of the wheel. Welch confirmed to the police that the Watch was his.

Apparently, since the victim turned off her Life360 app, Welch kept his version active on the Apple Watch to get around deactivation. He, then, used the app to track down the location of his girlfriend even when she did not have the app activated.

This may be one of the rarest incidents where an Apple Watch was used to track someone because most incidents around snooping on people and stalking them from last year and earlier this year have been associated with AirTags. Apple received several complaints from people who said they were being stalked through AirTags. Eventually, Apple did roll out anti-stalking features to AirTags, but now it seems it will have to find a way to limit tracking on the Apple Watch.