I couldn’t. By the time I needed the answer, it was already gone.
Markus B. and +12,000 protected customers
You're reading this on a phone that cost you a few hundred euros.
It has a case on it, doesn't it?
Probably a screen protector too.
You didn't agonise over either of them. You bought the phone and you bought the case in the same ten minutes, because obviously you did.
Now look at the rest of what you carry.
The bag you take absolutely everywhere. The bike you leave outside shops. The wallet that's on you every single day of your life. The suitcase you hand to a stranger at an airport and then walk away from.
What's protecting any of those?
Nothing. Not one of them.
Think about what that actually means for a second.
You protected the item that is insured, replaceable, backed up, and findable from your laptop in about four seconds.
And the ones that are none of those things? You left them with nothing at all.
So why?
Not because you don't care. You put a case on a phone you'd replace in a day.
It's because a case is for dropping — and you can picture dropping something. You've done it. It's real to you.
Theft isn't real to you. It's a thing that happens in stories, to other people, in other cities.
Right up until the afternoon it isn't.
And you did it again this week without thinking about it once.
You locked it outside a shop and walked in.
Or left it in the boot of the car while you popped inside somewhere.
Or put it on a belt and watched it disappear through the rubber flaps.
Or slid it onto the rack at the end of a carriage and sat down four rows away.
Now imagine one of those was the last time you ever saw it.
Not "might be gone." Gone. You're standing there and it isn't.
And somebody asks you one question:
Where is it right now?
Not where it was. Where it is, at this second, while you're standing there.
You can't answer that.
Nobody can.
And that — not the theft, not the money — is the actual problem.
I know it's the whole thing, because I've sat in that chair.
My bag went from the boot of a car at a motorway service station, in the eleven minutes it took my wife to buy two coffees. No broken glass. No noise. I didn't notice until we were fifty kilometres down the road.
At the police station they were kind. They're always kind, that's the thing nobody tells you.
He asked what there was to go on.
A frame number. A serial. Anything on it that could be traced or seen.
I had a description of a bag.
He wrote it down. Not judgementally.
But I watched him write it, and I understood what it was worth.
And nobody was going to go looking anyway — not because they didn't care, but because there was nothing to look with. No location. No direction. By then, possibly not even the same country.
Here's why I'm telling you this instead of the rest of the story.
Answer that question yourself. Right now, sitting where you are.
Whichever of the four came into your head at the top of this page — if it went tonight, and someone asked you what there was to go on, what would you actually have?
A description. A rough idea of where you last saw it.
Nothing that points anywhere.
Everyone who owns one of these worked that out the same way I did. Afterwards.
You're reading this before.
I assumed what happened to me was rare. A bad afternoon. Wrong car park, wrong eleven minutes.
It isn't rare. And that isn't even the part that got me.
In Germany alone, 214,300 bicycle thefts were reported to police last year.
Worldwide, airlines mishandled 24 million suitcases.
Big, frightening numbers.
And they are still not the point.
This is the point.
Of all those reported bike thefts, police solved 11.5%.
For pickpocketing, it's 6.9%.
Read that one again.
Not because anybody stopped caring.
Because a description isn't something you can follow.
No location. No lead. No case.
Theft isn't really the risk. The risk is the hour afterwards — and right now, for you, nothing happens in that hour at all.
There's one more figure in there, and it's the one that made me sit up.
Bike theft in Germany actually fell last year. By 13%.
Not because thieves got lazy. Germany's federal police put it down to better security.
Better locks.
And trackers.
That's not a company saying that about its own product. That's the national police force, in a statistic, explaining why fewer bikes are being stolen.
So the things work.
They just only work for the people who fitted one before anything happened.
The bag was gone. I'd accepted that within a fortnight.
What I couldn't get past was everything else.
Because after something is taken from you, you start looking round at what you've still got. And I looked round, and nothing had changed.
The bike was still chained to the same railing outside the same shop.
The wallet was still in the same pocket.
The suitcase was still in the same cupboard, waiting for the next flight.
I'd been robbed once, and every single thing I owned was exactly as exposed as it had been that morning at the service station.
That's what I wanted to fix. Not the bag. The rest of it.
So I started looking, the way you do. Evenings, phone in hand, half-watching something else.
I looked at better locks first. The chunky ones, with a rating and a guarantee and a price to match.
A better lock makes a thing harder to take. It has nothing whatsoever to say about where that thing went afterwards.
I'd already had a lock.
Then I looked at insurance. Insurance pays for an object, eventually, minus an excess.
It doesn't find anything. It doesn't return anything. And it has no opinion at all about the week you spend replacing documents that were never worth money in the first place.
And then I remembered that one line in the police statistic.
Better locks. And trackers.
So I looked those up properly. Little things you put inside a bag, that tell you where the bag is.
Of course. It had been sitting in a government report the whole time and I'd read straight past it.
Then I priced it up, and that's where the whole thing fell apart.
Because it's never one thing you want to protect.
It's the bike, the wallet, the bag with the laptop in it, and the suitcase that goes on the plane.
Four things.
And nearly every option I found wanted paying twice. Once for the device, then every month afterwards, forever.
Four items. Four subscriptions. Indefinitely. For things I was hoping would never happen.
Rent, on plastic I'd already bought.
So I closed the laptop and told myself I'd sort it out later.
I didn't sort it out for three months.
And that, I think, is why almost nobody is protected. It isn't carelessness. The maths was made impossible on purpose.
This was the other thing I'd got wrong.
Everybody had told me the same thing. Just get an AirTag.
So I very nearly did. Twice. And then I sat down and actually looked at what one is.
It's white.
A small white plastic disc with an Apple logo on it, sold to hang off the outside of a bag on a keyring. That's not a flaw — that's the design. It's meant to be found by you.
The problem is that everybody on earth now knows what that is on sight.
Including, obviously, the one person you'd rather didn't.
And it only talks to iPhones.
This is the part that nobody had mentioned to me, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand.
An AirTag isn't finding anything by itself. It's quietly signalling to whatever Apple phones happen to pass near it, and those phones pass the location back to you.
Which works beautifully in a shopping street in a wealthy city. It works less well everywhere else — and in most of Europe, most phones aren't iPhones at all.
So you're relying on a network that a large share of the people around your missing bag simply aren't part of.
And we couldn't have shared it anyway.
My partner is on Android. "We'll both be able to see the suitcase" would have meant me, alone, narrating a screen to her at a baggage desk.
So by then I knew exactly what I was looking for.
Not a better lock. Not a white disc on a keyring that half the phones around it can't hear.
Something that goes inside things. That works on both networks. And that nobody charges me for twice.
It took most of those three months to find one.
Most of what I opened was the same white disc with a different name printed on it. Twice I nearly bought a subscription one anyway, out of sheer tiredness.
Then I found one that wasn't trying to be seen at all.
It's called WayyPinn, and it is deliberately boring to look at.
Matte black. Round. About as thin as an AirTag, and roughly the size of a coin.
There is no screen, no light, no cable and nothing to charge. You take it out of the box, pair it with your phone, and put it inside something.
It works on both finding networks — Apple's Find My and Google's Find Hub.
That matters more than it sounds. Most trackers pick a side, which means half the phones on earth can't see them and half the households can't share one. This one works on iPhone and on Android, so both of you can look at the same suitcase.
The battery runs for about two years. Not two months of forgetting to charge it. Two years of it sitting in a lining doing nothing.
And there is no subscription. No SIM. No monthly fee — the thing that made me abandon the whole idea the first time I looked into it.
I bought the three-pack, which comes with three trackers and three cases.
Three, because I had four things and one of them was going to have to wait. Which, as it turned out, taught me something about which of the four actually matters most — but I'll come back to that.
Not clipped to the frame, where it can be seen and thumbed off in four seconds.where somebody would have to be looking for it to find it.
A lock buys you time. It has never bought anybody safety.
Flat in the note compartment. You stop noticing it by the second day.
Cards get blocked in four minutes. That was never the problem.
It's the ID. The keys. The days you lose replacing things that only exist on paper.
A wallet that's somewhere is a wallet you can point at. A wallet that's nowhere costs you a week.
Under the padding, in the laptop sleeve.
Nobody takes a backpack for the backpack.
And some of what's on that laptop isn't replaceable with money at all. The photos you keep meaning to back up on Sunday.
This is the one I'd fit first if you only ever do one.
In the lining, before you zip it.
Theft is rare on a flight. Luggage going somewhere you aren't is not.
This is the one nobody buys it for.
It's also the one they end up using.
Do you know that feeling of standing at a baggage belt?
Not the first minute. The first minute is fine. Everyone's on their phone, the belt hasn't started, nobody is worried about anything.
I mean the eleventh minute.
When the gaps between bags get longer. When the same battered blue holdall comes round for the third time and nobody claims it. When the crowd at the rail has thinned out to six people who are all carefully not making eye contact with each other, because you're all in the same small unofficial club now and nobody wants to be the first to say it out loud.
Then the belt stops.
And you stand there for another minute anyway. Because surely.
Then you go to the desk, and somebody apologetic — somebody who does this eleven times a day — tells you your bag is "in the system."
Which means nothing. And you both know it means nothing.
You get a reference number. You get a form. You get told to call if you haven't heard anything in a few days.
That's the moment. Not the loss — the form.
Being handed a piece of paper and told that strangers will now handle something of yours, somewhere you can't see, on a timeline nobody will commit to.
In April, that was us.
Now, I want to be honest about something.
I bought these because of a thief. That was the entire reason. Somebody took a bag out of my car and I never saw it again, and three months later I was still angry enough to do something about it.
Standing at that desk was not what I had in mind.
But halfway through writing down a reference number I remembered that I'd put one of them in the lining of that suitcase in January, and hadn't thought about it once since.
So I opened my phone. Half expecting nothing.
It was in Lisbon.
At the airport we had left four hours earlier. Sitting exactly where somebody had failed to put it on a plane.
I want to be careful how I describe this, because nothing heroic happened next.
But I was standing in one country, looking at my own suitcase in another, while an official document in front of me described it as "in the system."
I turned the screen round and showed her.
She looked at it for a second longer than I expected. Then she made a note, and then she made a phone call — and the conversation stopped being we'll look into it and started being about one specific bag in one specific place.
It arrived at our house the next afternoon.
Not a rescue. Nobody ran anywhere. Just the difference between waiting and knowing.
And it's the exact thing that was missing in that police station.
This time I had something to point at.
You lock your front door every day without once thinking of yourself as a fearful person.
There's a smoke alarm above your head that has done absolutely nothing for years.
Same category of object. Cheap, invisible, easy to forget entirely — right up until the afternoon it isn't.
So here's the only thing I'd leave you with.
That thing that came into your head at the top of this page. The bike, the bag, whichever one it was.
You're going to leave it somewhere this week.
You already know where. You probably already know roughly when.
And the only part of that you still get to decide is whether, if it isn't there when you come back, you've got anything at all to go on.
Real stories from customers who use WAYYPINN every day.
Finally, tracking without another subscription
I wanted trackers for my bike, backpack, wallet and suitcase, but refused to pay four monthly fees. One multipack solved everything. Setup was quick, and now I can check all four whenever I need to.
Small enough to stay hidden
I was worried a tracker would be obvious, but these disappear inside my belongings. One sits flat in my wallet, another is hidden in my backpack, and the bike tracker can’t be spotted unless you know where to look.
Already helped with lost luggage
Our suitcase never appeared at baggage reclaim. While the airline could only say it was ‘in the system’, I could see it was still at our departure airport. That information helped get it returned the next day.
Peace of mind without feeling paranoid
I don’t constantly check the app, and that’s exactly the point. The trackers stay out of sight until something goes missing. Knowing I can find my belongings if needed makes travelling and commuting much less stressful.
The multipack made sense
I originally wanted one for my bike. Once I realised I could protect my wallet, work bag and suitcase too, the multipack became the obvious choice. No subscriptions, no separate orders, no complicated setup.
Wish I had bought them sooner
I once had a backpack stolen and could give the police nothing beyond where I last saw it. That helpless feeling stayed with me. Now my important belongings have trackers inside them, so at least I can answer the most important question: where are they?
For the next 72 hours:
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