Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
My money is on a wifi SSID that matches the one used by thieves or a heavily-trafficked location the victims all pass through.<p>My company moved ~5 blocks and it really screwed up the map on my phone (which I use to get around the city) for several months. My company had left the network SSID the same in the old location, so that no one had to re-configure their wifi. Even with GPS on, my phone was always convinced it was in the old location up the block, and this would persist even when I was out on the street, until I walked around a bit.<p>There are companies (presumably Skyhook is one of them) who drive around mapping SSIDs to physical locations. The problem is that SSIDs can move or be duplicated elsewhere.<p>The article says of one of the couple "at one point he reset their router, and changed the frequency at which it broadcasts; it didn’t solve the problem." It does not say if he changed the SSID.<p>Theoretically, location is often determined using not just one but several nearby SSIDs, a sort of triangulation. Another possibility here is that there are multiple nearby SSIDs around this home that match the SSIDs surrounding some other area tied to the victims.