By Sean McPolin
A worried mother has issued a warning to other parents after she found an AirTag in her son's shoe which had been there for more than a month.
Jackie Giurleo, from Florida, said she went through "every mother's worst nightmare" when she found the device - which can be used to track people's or items whereabouts - on the youngster's shoes.
Giurelo became concerned when she began getting iPhone alerts that one of her tags was nearby, despite not owning any, at a Christmas parade on Satellite Beach. A map of all the places her son had been started to pop up and that's when her "heart dropped" as she thought someone was tracking her seven-year-old son.
The frantic mum began looking through her son Aidan's toys, clothes and shoes when she noticed an AirTag at the bottom of one of his trainers. Giurleo took the device to the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, where deputies subpoenaed Apple to get the address of the person who owned the offending tracking device.
However, it turned out to be just a mix up which occurred when her son had taken his shoes off at the parade to get on the bouncy castle and accidentally switched shoes with another. The mum explained: "Luckily, it just turned into a happy coincidence of a tale of two mums.
"I can remember that I saw one of the kids had the same shoes as me, and I think we put them in the same places, and then we just swapped," Aidan said. "I took his, and he took mine."
The other child was visiting the state from Oklahoma while on vacation and it was his parents who had placed an AirTag in his shoes to keep an eye on him in case there was some sort of emergency, Fox News reports.
Speaking at her relief on finding out her son wasn't being tracked, the Florida mum said: "We were really lucky that we had a happy ending." Giurleo said that, after all this, she learned more than she lost and just might use AirTags herself at theme parks or other crowded places.
"We have never had AirTags," she added. "I knew about them with luggage and keys and things like that – I never thought about them when it came to tracking your kids."
