Flickr Freak

‘Welcome to teh Intarweb, losers. Now you can go to jail.’

That’s what a Dutch guy’s first reaction was when pictures of the thugs who had stolen his phone showed up in his Flickr photostream. But things don’t turn out to be that straightforward.

So what happened?

A few days ago, a Dutch 25-year old blogged about how he’d lost his mobile. It could have happened anywhere, really – on the bus, on the train or at any moment of his journey that day. He was unable to do more than report his phone as stolen (or missing) to the police and block his SIM.

Losing a mobile phone, however, is never a police priority, so that would have been the last he ever heard of it.

Or so he thought.

This morning, the guy, Martijn, was rather surprised to see several pictures he had never taken himself show up in his Flickr photostream . Together with a rather mysterious image of a parrot, there was one pic showing two guys he’d never seen before.

The guys who had either stolen, or found, his phone.

Now, Martijn had a little app by ShoZu installed . With this program, the phone’s user is asked whether they want to automatically upload the pics they’ve just shot to their Flickr account. The two curious looking types apparently had no idea what this meant and clicked ‘yes’.

So, now the guy knows who has his phone, but he doesn’t know who they are. And the police still can’t do a thing, because the duo might just have well ‘found’ the phone.

If they did find it, they’re not the most honest of types either, because they should have just turned it in at the nearest cop shop – not switch SIMs and use it for taking happy snaps of themselves.

The two won’t remain anonymous for long though. Dutch satirical news site GeenStijl (NoStyle) has already picked up on the story, and the item has everything to become quite the ’skateboarding parrot’ for the regular news stations as well.

I’m real interested for sure to see how this little Flickr gem will turn out.