This Air Canada employee found a passenger's lost phone — then it disappeared

Olu Awoseyi remembers that sinking feeling after boarding a plane that he didn't have his three-month-old, pricey Samsung phone. 

Awoseyi, his wife and two children were returning from a vacation from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. They had just taken their seats on the Toronto to Edmonton leg of their trip when he realized his phone was missing.  

He got his wife to call the phone, only to be disappointed, "We didn't hear vibrate or ring around me, so I knew I dropped it at the point of boarding."  

It was too close to take-off to go look for it. But when he returned home, he remembered he'd installed a security application called Bitdefender on the phone. The app was set up to snap a photo of anyone who tried to unlock the phone with the wrong PIN. 

Sure enough, he found a photo taken approximately 90 minutes after he'd boarded his flight: It was an Air Canada employee staring back at him.

He studied the photo carefully, double-checking the colours of the person's uniform. "At first I was kind of excited," he told Go Public.

"I think I'm in good hands. If it's an employee of Air Canada that found it, then I'm OK." 

That was Oct. 9. Over the next five weeks his optimism turned to anger and frustration as he repeatedly called and emailed Air Canada's customer service and communicated with its online customer support chat service — to no avail.

He also tried to track the phone using Bitdefender and the Google Find My Device app. But the phone appeared to be switched off, so the trackers didn't work. 

On Nov. 9, an Air Canada agent said a Samsung phone had been turned in at the Pearson Airport's lost and found. But Awoseyi had checked, and the lost and found service said they did not have his phone. 

A little over a week later, Air Canada customer service wrote a conflicting email, saying the airline had identified and interviewed the employee in the photo. 

It said, according to the employee and an eyewitness, the phone had been returned to the Air Canada customer service desk, in Pearson's international area. 

Despite this, the email went on to explain, the phone was nowhere to be found.

"We have conducted our own thorough search this morning at the airport's Lost and Found, as well as at Air Canada's Lost and Found," it said, "but regrettably, we have not Located your phone."