Media personality Willis Raburu has recovered his high-end Samsung Galaxy Fold phone days after it was stolen during an entertainment event in Nairobi.
Raburu said the gadget, worth about Sh240,000, was traced and recovered with the help of social media users and police officers after images of a suspect were captured by the phone’s inbuilt anti-theft app.
The TV host first reported the loss of his phone during Furaha Fest, an event he helped organise at the Carnivore grounds, prompting an online search campaign that quickly went viral.
When an individual tried to unlock the stolen device, the app — CrookCatcher — secretly took blurry photos of a man wearing a bucket hat and automatically sent them to Raburu’s email and cloud storage.
Raburu then shared the images on social media, appealing to Kenyans to help identify the suspect. Within hours, the post had spread widely, drawing what he later described as “a massive crowdsourced investigation.”
“We found the phone! Thank you to all the social media DCI who helped,” Raburu wrote on Facebook after the recovery. “We found his home, found him, his job, and spoke to his family all because of your help.”
According to Raburu, the combined efforts of members of the public, officers from the Kibera Police Station, and his security team led to the successful tracing of the man in possession of the device.
Interestingly, an earlier recovery effort turned up a different phone, but police eventually located Raburu’s actual Galaxy Fold.
The journalist said he chose not to press charges against the suspect, identified only as Mr B, but issued him a stern warning.
“We decided not to press charges but have let him go with a warning. Whatever happens from here to Mr B should he resort to his old ways is on him,” he said.
Raburu thanked his followers for their support, saying the case underscored the power of social media and digital tools in solving real-world problems.
The incident has also renewed public interest in smartphone security, with experts advising users to install anti-theft apps such as CrookCatcher or Find My Device, regularly back up files, enable biometric or password locks, and promptly report stolen phones to police and network providers.
