An Aucklander who lost her phone at a music festival has told the story of how she tracked it down and came metres away from the people who stole it.
Zoe Norton attended the music festival Friday Jams on Sunday when she left her phone behind in a port-a-loo.
"Twenty minutes later I went back and it wasn't there. I asked my friend to ring it but it was turned off. It had heaps of charge. I was a bit confused about that."
But the loss of her phone didn't put her off from seeing US singer Akon.
"Six-year-old Zoe would be frothing at this opportunity."
The following day rolled around and by then, her phone had been off the entire time.
Norton told AM by Monday afternoon, her iPhone was turned on and she was able to track where it was on Find My iPhone.
"I could see it and it was in Hamilton. I was like, 'what?'."
The self-made sleuth then continued to watch her stolen phone's movements, before it was on its way back to Auckland.
"And then I wait until it's at a location for about 30 minutes, just to make sure they are staying there for a good period of time."
Norton waited for her flatmate Oceon Grady to get home from work before the pair set off on their chase to recover the phone.
"I maps it, it's 15 minutes away. We were like, 'should we just go?'. In the car we get. We had no idea who these people were, we don't know what they looked like at all."
Grady said they had no real plan for when and if they were to find the people holding Norton's phone.
"We were just like, 'we'll see what happens'."
Norton said she always uses Grady's data hotspot, so once they came to the location where the phone was, Grady turned their hotspot on.
"My phone automatically always connects, so it connected when we were in the car park, two cars over [from the people with the phone]."
Once they spotted the people with Norton's phone, she said: "I had this image in my head, I'm going to go up there, knock on the window and demand my phone back."
But the people with her phone soon drove off. Norton and Grady wrote down the car's number plate and tracked the phone near Auckland's airport.
"We relocate the car, we confirm it's them and then we were like, 'oh we need to call the cops, like, we can't take this matter any further because it's dangerous'."
Norton said as she went to call the police, there was a police officer already parked in the car park.
Norton and Grady walk over to the policewoman and inform her of their situation.
"She [the police officer] goes and investigates, so she's sort of scoping it out after we told her the story and everything."
Norton said 40 minutes followed and the car had moved again and police had almost given up hope.
"Me and Oceon were like, 'oh we should probably go but we're gonna hide in the bush', because we love the plot, we don't know what's going to happen, we love the drama."
Following the ordeal, Norton said police turned their lights on and retrieved the phone.
Watch the full interview above.
