‘This is happening to multiple people’: UPS delivers California man’s iPhone. Then he looks in the box

A California-based TikToker who goes by Ethan Pearl (@ethanpearl_) says his AppleCare+ replacement iPhone reached his door in a factory-sealed box with nothing inside—and that the tracking route before delivery convinced him someone in the shipping chain took it.

The story

Pearl admits he dropped his phone in the ocean last Monday, hence the need for a replacement. He filed an AppleCare+ Theft and Loss claim. He says it was approved for a two-day replacement.

But he ran into a problem: Apple uses UPS, which sent a signature-required notification. “I live in a crazy apartment complex,” he says. “Signing is, like, not an option.” The pickup-point option was grayed out, according to him, so he redirected the package to his building's mailroom.

“The second I sent it off, the date on my package like shifted around,” he says. From California, he watched the shipment travel to Arizona, back to California, up to Nevada, and back again. When it finally showed as delivered, a blurry Ring photo caught the box on his porch. “It's fully sealed, like the Apple where you, like, peel it back,” he says. “I peel it back. I open the foam and everything. It's empty.”

Apple, per Pearl, asked whether he had filmed himself opening the box. He hadn't. The company told him a replacement would take two to four weeks and pointed him to an Apple Store for a loaner. Then he says the store told him it does not offer loaner iPhones. He canceled an Amazon order after the tracking pulled the same “Bermuda Triangle thing,” then paid roughly $800 for an iPhone 17e in person. A store employee, he says, told him a friend had the same thing happen—that thieves “put, like, CDs in the box for, like, the weight.”

The peanut gallery

Others say they have experienced something similar. One woman wrote, “OMGGGG for the past few days they kept saying that they ‘tried to deliver my phone, but I wasn't home' BUT I'VE BEEN HOME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!!!”

Some said drivers see customers as targets because they understand where products come from, since they see them every single shift. “Some drivers are known to steal,” one commenter said. “I've had FedEx drivers try to steal from me; these drivers know what's in the packages and who they are from because they work so long for the company.”

Not an isolated case

In January, Louisville Metro Police charged four UPS employees with stealing $155,000 in Apple products from the UPS Centennial Hub; one backpack held 45 iPhones. LMPD spokesperson Matt Sanders said police and UPS had “recovered about $107,000 in stolen merchandise” and were “still missing roughly $48,000 worth of Apple products.”

An August Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office investigation described the exact repackaging scheme Pearl suspects: surveillance video, per the arrest report, caught a UPS package handler stripping original labels off electronics shipments and pulling the phones from their boxes, while an “Overgoods clerk” repackaged the items with new UPS shipping labels and slid them back into the outbound stream.

Buzz News reached out to Ethan Pearl via TikTok message and comment, and to Apple and UPS via email.