Florida Mom Locates Tracking Device in Son’s Shoe: Safety or Fright?

Clear Facts

• A Florida mother, Jackie Giurleo, discovered an AirTag in her seven-year-old son’s shoe, causing initial panic when she began receiving alerts of her son’s locations.
• The AirTag was traced back to a family from Oklahoma, whose son had swapped shoes with Giurleo’s son during a Christmas parade bounce house event, leading to a mix-up.
• Giurleo expressed relief that the situation was a misunderstanding and shared her newfound consideration for using AirTags in crowded places to track her child.

Every parent’s priority is the safety and well-being of their child. Hence, a mother in Florida was shocked to her core when she discovered her son was being tracked by an unknown party using an AirTag found in his shoe. She described the incident as “every mother’s worst nightmare.”

Jackie Giurleo didn’t own any AirTags and was understandably puzzled to start receiving alerts of her son’s locations while he was at a Christmas parade on Satellite Beach. She searched her son’s belongings to make sense of these alerts, and the distressing discovery of the AirTag in his shoe made her “heart dropped.”

She revealed, “It had been tracking him for nearly a month.”

Her son, seven-year-old Aidan, admitted that despite his active lifestyle, he never felt the AirTag in his shoe. Worried, Giurleo took the AirTag to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.

After gathering the necessary information, deputies approached Apple to trace the owner of the AirTag. Their search led them beyond the state’s borders.

Giurleo clarified, “Luckily, it just turned into a happy coincidence of a tale of two moms.”

The mystery began to unravel when Aidan remembered swapping his shoes with another boy at the Christmas parade bounce house. Aidan shared, “I can remember that I saw one of the kids had the same shoes as me, and I think we put them in the same places, and then we just swapped. I took his, and he took mine.”

The other boy was from Oklahoma, visiting Florida on vacation. His parents had put an AirTag in his shoe as a safety measure. Unbeknownst to them, they were inadvertently tracking Aidan, not their own son.

As the truth came out, Giurleo felt a wave of relief. The situation was a simple mix-up rather than the malicious act she had initially feared.

“We were really lucky that we had a happy ending,” the relieved mother shared.

The incident has reshaped her viewpoint, and she is now considering using AirTags to keep an eye on her son in busy places like theme parks.

“We have never had AirTags before,” she said. “I knew about them for locating luggage and keys and things like that – I never thought about them when it came to tracking your kids.”

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