Lost Wallet Located on BART

The stress associated with losing your wallet is something that we wish no one ever has to go through. In addition to losing money, you often have to go through the arduous process replacing identification cards, and canceling credit cards. It's something no one has time for. When you lose your wallet while traveling or on mass transportation, things get even trickier. However, if you have a network like Tile where thousands of people in every major city is your personal search party, the odds are in your favor. The following story shows how Tile helped recover a young man recover his wallet in the lost & found BART system.

After getting off a BART train at the Rockridge station, my son couldn’t find his wallet. His wallet contained a Tile, and he quickly tried using the app to see if his wallet might be in his backpack or someplace he couldn’t find it, but it said “out of range”, and he realized he had taken his wallet out while on the train, and must not have put it securely in his pocket. He marked the Tile as “lost” within the app.

We went on line to report a missing item on BART, and their instructions say that it generally takes more than a week for items turned in to station managers to make their way to the BART lost-and-found at the Civic Center station. A few days later, it occurred to us to check to see if the Tile had been located, and the app showed that it was at the Walnut Creek Bart station (3 stops down the line from where he got off). Other people who had the Life360 app on their phone must have walked within range of his wallet. It was several days before he was able to get to the Walnut Creek station, but we were getting several updated reports of it being located at the BART station. We didn’t know if the wallet found been found and turned in, or if someone had taken the contents of the wallet and discarded it at the station.

My son went to the Walnut Creek BART station, used the Life360 app and got pings showing it was in the ticket office. No one was in at the moment, so he found an employee and said “I think you have my wallet in your ticket office”. The employee responded “How do you know?”, and he told them he had an app on his phone that had located it. Opening up the ticket office, his wallet was pinging. They had previously started filling out the paper work to send it to the lost and found, but since the wallet was clearly his, they completed the paper work to turn it over to him.

- Bill P.