Miller immediately discounted calling police, thinking they would do little to pursue a minor theft. He sent several messages to the phone telling the thief to turn it in, but received no response.

So he turned to Mark's MacBook Pro, which was equipped with a wireless broadband card allowing it to access the web from anywhere.

After logging in to Apple's Me.com, Miller ascertained that the phone was located at Medill Street, a few kilometres from the bar.

The trio drove to the location and came across a crowded street party and a large apartment block. Miller brought the laptop with him but the circle on the map showed the phone could be anywhere on the block.

"'Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet (30 metres) across," Miller wrote.

Then the circle started moving on to another street and the trio cornered him at a bus stop. The thief had no idea he was being traced, Miller wrote, and started running before he was caught by Miller and his friends in "a flanking manoeuvre".

"Our iPhone pilfering friend apparently works at the sketchy bar, and as he fished around in his bag, he gave a questionable alibi about having found the phone, intending to return it, but being intimidated by `all these scary-looking messages' that kept popping up on the display," Miller wrote.

The thief handed back the phone, Miller shook his hand, and the trio walked off.

"We laughed triumphantly, adrenaline racing, feeling like the Jack Bauer trio (disregard the fact that we'd just left a Lego convention)," he wrote.

"All said and done, it was almost worth losing the phone just for the thrill of finding it like this. We want to pitch a reality show to the Discovery Channel: `Phone Hunters'. It certainly felt like we were in one there for a second."

In April, a US woman checking her video surveillance system from the internet while she was at work caught four people robbing her house. She was able to watch while 18 officers surrounded the house and nabbed the looters.

Last year in New York, US police arrested two men and recovered almost $6000 worth of stolen computers and electronic devices after the owner of one of the stolen laptops was able to connect remotely to her Apple MacBook and photograph the thief.

Similarly, when an engineering student's house was burgled in Philadelphia in March last year, he published the clues on a discussion website and an army of volunteer sleuths were able to track down the thieves and seize back two of the three stolen goods.