Victims are often desperate to recover their stolen phones, which, as home to their texts, photos and friends’ phone numbers, can feel less like devices than like extensions of their hands. In New York City, more than 18 percent of all grand larcenies last year involved Apple products. Since 2011, cellphone thefts have risen more than 26 percent in Los Angeles robberies involving phones were up 23 percent in San Francisco just last year. More than three million were stolen last year, according to a survey by Consumer Reports. Smartphones have become irresistibly delectable morsels for thieves. “It opens up the opportunity for people to take the law into their own hands, and they can get themselves into really deep water if they go to a location where they shouldn’t go.”

“This is a new phenomenon - it’s not simply running after the person to grab the phone,” said George Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney and a former police chief. But the emergence of this kind of do-it-yourself justice - an unintended result of the proliferation of GPS tracking apps - has stirred worries among law enforcement officials that people are putting themselves in danger, taking disproportionate risks for the sake of an easily replaced item. With smartphone theft rampant, apps like Find My iPhone offer a new option for those desperate to recover their devices, allowing victims like Ms. “When I told my mom what I did, she thought I was crazy,” Ms. Maguire, a slight, 26-year-old yoga instructor, did what a growing number of phone theft victims have done: She went to confront the thieves - and, to her surprise, got the phones back. Using the Find My iPhone app on her computer, she found that someone had taken the phones to a home in this Los Angeles exurb, 30 miles east of her West Hollywood apartment.

Were they at the bar, she wondered, or in the cab? After a boozy Saturday night, Sarah Maguire awoke the next morning to find that her iPhone was gone.

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