Technology is a wonderful thing, but when that technology fails on you, it can be very frustrating. Sometimes, however, technology does exactly what it is supposed to and you find a fringe benefit you weren’t expecting.

This was the case when Katy McCaffrey’s iPhone was stolen on a Disney Cruise. It turns out her unwitting thief was off having fun with his newly discovered iPhone and failed to turn off the iCloud feature, which was still connected to Katy’s service.

If you don’t already know, the iCloud feature automatically saves every picture you take on your phone to the cloud server so that you can automatically have a copy of those pictures on all your other iDevices. So while she was lamenting the loss of her pricey iPhone, she was treated to a photo journal of its misadventures with its new owner!

So Katy decided to contact the Disney Cruiseline since it appeared from the collection of pictures, the culprit may well be a staff member. She also posted a Facebook Group called “Stolen iPhone Adventures” with pictures of the alleged thief. She calls him Nelson, for no real reason other than she doesn’t know his real name, but its pretty obvious he works for the Disney Cruise. There are even pictures of the alleged thief with his pregnant significant other.

This could cause a bit of a media attention that would hopefully result in the employee being identified, getting to the bottom of this mystery. Katy is hoping that in addition to getting her phone back, after sending these photos to the Disney Cruiselines she might get some travel perks or park passes.

But to be fair, while this might be the guy who is using the iPhone it doesn’t necessarily mean he was the one who stole it. It might have been sold to him by a cruise patron, or maybe in his duties he found it and just made no effort to get it back to its owner (which might be as bad as stealing it, really).

Hopefully this works out for her, in the meantime it is fun to hear how technology bit back!

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that a rep at Disney Cruiselines has been in touch with Katy McCaffery and “working to make it right”. The phone has been recovered, but no news as to whether the staff member was the culprit, though a staff member was put on “administrative leave” until it gets resolved. That sounds leading, doesn’t it?