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2010-04-30 06:58:07
Thu Apr 29, 7:50 pm ET
Twenty-one-year-old Redwood City, California, resident Brian J. Hogan, the man
identified by Wired.com as the guy who found and later sold Apple's missing
iPhone in a bar last month, has a message for Apple, the engineer who
originally lost the precious gadget, and the tech world at large: Sorry about
that.
Following a trail of "clues" on social-networking sites and confirming his ID
with a source "involved in the iPhone find," Wired named Hogan on Thursday as
the bar patron who made off with Apple's top-secret iPhone prototype and then
sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000 after an Apple software engineer left the
precious phone on a bar stool.
Up until now, Hogan's identity has been a mystery to the public, but the
21-year-old college student (or at least, he was a college student as of 2008)
may have sensed that he was in trouble after all the hoopla over Gizmodo's
gigantic iPhone scoop last week and the subsequent fallout, including a raid on
Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's house by San Mateo sheriff's deputies armed with a
search warrant.
Hogan has now lawyered up, and in a statement released through his attorney,
the young man says he "regrets his mistake in not doing more to return the
phone," and that he thought his $5,000 deal with Gizmodo was only "so that they
could review the phone," Wired reports.
According to Hogan's attorney's statement, Hogan didn't see the lost iPhone
until another patron at the Redwood City bar came up and asked him if it was
his; Hogan apparently then asked a few other patrons if they'd lost the device
before heading out, iPhone in hand, according to Wired.
Initial reports had it that the man who'd taken the iPhone tried repeatedly to
call the Apple Care support line to return the phone, but according to the
statement in the Wired story, Hogan never personally called Apple, although a
friend of his offered to. The owners of the bar where the iPhone was lost also
told Wired that Hogan never bothered to call them about the lost hardware,
although the anguished Apple engineer who mislaid the iPhone "returned several
times" to see if it had turned up.
Meanwhile, CNET is reporting that Hogan had help in finding a buyer for the
lost iPhone. The "go-between," according to CNET: 27-year-old Sage Robert
Wallower, a UC Berkeley student who "contacted technology sites" about the
handset. Wallower told CNET that he "didn't see it or touch it in any manner"
but knows "who found it," adding, "I need to speak to a lawyer ... I think I
have said too much."
No one has been charged yet in the case of the lost iPhone, but a deputy
district attorney for San Mateo County tells Wired that Hogan is "very
definitely ... being looked at as a suspect in theft." (In California, finding
a piece of lost property isn't a case of "finders keepers"; if you find a lost
item and keep it without making "reasonable" efforts to find the real owner,
you could be charged with a crime.)
Gizmodo's Jason Chen also has yet to be charged; law-enforcement officials have
reportedly said they'll hold off on searching the computers and servers seized
from Chen's house until they decide whether California's shield law for
journalists applies to him.
Wired: iPhone Finder Regrets His Mistake
CNET: The people involved in sale of iPhone revealed
Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.