According to AppleInsider, a man in Nashville, Tennessee, has been arrested for tracking the location of his girlfriend by installing an Apple Watch in a vehicle and using a tracking app. Lawrence Welch, 29, was arrested on Friday and charged with installing an electronic tracking device in a vehicle, according to an arrest affidavit. In this example, Welch chose to use the Apple Watch for tracking instead of AirTags.
Police were called to a home security centre after a security guard said a victim’s boyfriend had turned up and a protection order was being obtained. According to WSMV4, the victim claimed that her boyfriend had made multiple killing threats to her and that she had been to the center in the past.
The victim told police that she and Welch had used Life360 to monitor each other’s location, but she had closed the app in the past before visiting the Family Safety Center. In this case, she was bombarded with text messages asking her to reveal her location, as well as asking her to call him back.
Police said Welch did eventually arrive at the home services center, but he went to the victim’s car and crouched by a wheel instead of near the building. When police arrived at the vehicle, they found an Apple Watch hanging from the spokes, which Welch confirmed was his device.
It appears that in order to bypass the deactivation of the Life360 app on the victim’s device, Welch instead kept his version active on the Apple Watch and relied on that version to track her down.
The incident is a continuation of a previous incident in July 2021, in which Welch faces a pair of domestic assault charges. He was later arrested for those incidents in December.
The use of the Apple Watch is unusual because most of the tracking-related stories in late 2021 and early 2022 revolve around AirTags. Despite having an anti-stalking feature that saved some potential victims by alerting it to its existence, it was also the subject of multiple stories detailing attempts to stalk targets, as well as complaints from multiple critics.