Unable to fight the desire for a phone she could not afford to buy, a Chinese woman ended up stealing a new iPhone by ripping through the anti-theft cord with her teeth at an Apple Store.

The woman, surnamed Qiu, became the talk of the internet in China earlier this month, after the security cameras at an Apple Store in Fuzhou City, China’s Fujian Province, caught her stealing an iPhone in a rather unusual way. Footage that has since gone viral online shows the woman entering an electronics store and heading straight for the smartphone section, where she proceeds to inspect the device on display. She can be seen glancing around furtively to see if anyone else is around, before grabbing an iPhone and starting to chew on the anti-theft cord securing the device to the display stand.

Photo: Thay Nguyen/Unsplash

If you’ve ever messed around with the anti-theft cord on a display phone, you’ve probably accidentally triggered an annoyingly loud alarm. As you can imagine, ripping through the cord with your teeth has a similar effect. However, in this case, was lucky that the staff simply ignored the sound, thinking it was just a false alarm, and shut it off, allowing the woman to simply walk out with the stolen handheld.

Unfortunately for Qiu, she ended up biting off more than she could chew, as the staff noticed the missing phone soon after she left and notified the police. China’s facial recognition technology is notoriously efficient, and authorities managed to not only identify the woman in record time but also place her in custody just minutes after she got home.

 

Chinese media reported that the woman tried explaining that she had recently lost her phone and she intended to buy another but was put off by the high price of a brand new iPhone 14 Plus. As she couldn’t afford to spend 7,000 yuan ($900) on a new phone, she decided to steal it instead. She now faces a prison sentence of three years, and a 200,000 yuan (27,400) fine.