14 DAY TRIAL // When he was 21 years old, Brian Hogan gained possession of a prototype iPhone 4 left on a bar stool by an Apple employee. He actually avoided taking it, but got stuck with it and took it home.
He didn’t know it at the time, but the decision to take the prototype iPhone unit was going to change his life drastically.
“When I was 21 I was at a bar pretty late at night with 2 friends,” Brian writes in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) thread.
“After the last call both of my friends went to the bathroom, as they left a random drunk guy came out, walked up to me, picked up the phone on the bar stool next to me, and said don’t forget your phone.”
Brian knew the phone wasn’t his, but the drunk guy insisted that he takes it and finds the owner. Brian accepted.
“I ask around and cant [sic] figure out who it belongs to, and after my friends returned we left and walked home having intentions of figuring out who the phone belonged to and giving it back.”
When he woke up the next day, Brian had actually forgotten he was in the possession of a lost item.
When he finally remembered about it, he “went about trying to figure out who it belonged to,” as he writes on Reddit.
After checking with Craigslist and other parts of the web, Brian noticed that the phone’s screen had an extremely high resolution, as well as “pieces/buttons in strange places.”
“When I took the case off I found an iPhone with a flat back, flat edges, and a forward facing camera.”
He also noticed the strange Xs on the back of the phone, a clear designation of a prototype device, though Brian had no idea what he was holding in his hands. Yet.
As the story goes (and everyone even remotely familiar with the case will recall this), he ended up selling the device to tech site Gizmodo for $5,000 / €3840. He was promised to receive another $3,000 / €2300 if Apple would confirm the device was theirs.
Then the nightmare began. The authorities started investigating the matter, the editor who covered the leak got his house raided by the cops, and Brian actually had to move to a hotel for a whole week to get away from the media.
“It was extremely tough on my family, there were news vans in front of my house and we ended up staying at a hotel in the east bay for a week until they left,” he writes.
“My name got out in the media because my girlfriend at the time made a Facebook post about it, which I asked her to delete, but the press found her and she couldn’t deal with all the stress that followed and we broke up maybe 3 months after that,” he reveals.
On top of it all, Brian was criminally charged.
