Sam King, 28, whose Apple iPhone 7 was stolen in August at a beach party in Marbella, has said his ‘faith in humanity’ has been restored after it was returned by a stranger
A British holidaymaker whose Apple iPhone 7 was stolen in August at a beach party in Marbella has said his ‘faith in humanity’ has been restored after it was returned by a stranger three months later.
Sam King, 28, had been working on the Spanish resort in July for a month and decided to stay for an extra week with friends with his £120 phone was stolen at a beach party.
However three months later Mr King’s friend Tara Scotter, 26, started receiving unusual calls.
When she finally picked up a Spanish phone repairer called Isaac Pulido told her he had bought the phone on a market, discovered it was stolen and wanted to return it.
Mr King, a television producer, later received a package containing his phone with a message reading: ‘I would like to believe that there is still good people. Karma always gives you back what you to others. Isaac.’
Mr King, from Manchester, said: ‘Having the phone returned has really restored my faith in humanity.
‘You watch the news with people fighting and everything else that is going on. I think it’s quite refreshing for something like this to happen.
‘Isaac, the man who sent my phone back, had bought it on a market in Spain for 50 Euros. He’d bought it for spare parts and was told it didn’t work but when he turned it on he found the lost message.
Mr King said his faith in humanity had been restored after having his iPhone returned
‘You never expect anyone to hand your phone in once it’s gone missing – whether it’s stolen or they just find it.
‘I didn’t believe it when I first heard from him. I told myself not to get too excited until I actually received the phone because you never know, but he sent it and it didn’t have a mark on it.
‘He could easily have kept it, or used the parts, or kept the phone for himself.’
Mr King, a television producer, had his £120 iPhone 7 returned three months after he lost it
Mr King received a package containing his phone with this message reading: ‘I would like to believe that there is still good people. Karma always gives you back what you to others. Isaac’
Mr King and Miss Scotter had spent hours tracking the phone before giving up and expecting to never see it again.
The 28-year-old said: ‘We’d been out in Marbella filming in July with work and stayed out there for a week afterwards.
‘On the second-to-last night, I lost my phone but to be honest, that’s not out of the ordinary for me. You can put it in lost mode then whoever finds it, it will come up with a message telling them who to contact but no-one called.
‘When we tracked it, we could see the phone moving around. It was as if someone had it. After an hour, it ended up in the mountains of Marbella and we accepted that I’d been stolen never to be seen again, along with my holiday pictures.
‘I came home a couple of days later and got a new phone. I accepted that I’d lost all of my holiday pictures.
‘Two weeks ago, Tara, whose number I used for people to call if the phone was found, kept getting crackly phone calls from a foreign person.
‘At first, she dismissed them as sales calls but when they called back, she messaged me saying ‘you are never going to believe it, you’re getting your phone back’.
‘I was devastated because my photos from the holiday hadn’t been backed up, so I thought they were all lost. It had been three months since I got back from Marbella when I received it.
‘It had been a difficult couple of months and then this happened.’
He added: ‘I hope it’s a sign of things to come and better luck in 2018.’