The iPhone5. Photo: Apple.

A victim of a theft used her own ingenuity to capture the crooks after police came up empty handed, local Brooklyn blog Crownheights.info reports.

The victim, a young Jewish woman in her 20″²s, was assaulted and had her Apple iPhone stolen in Brooklyn last week by two teenage girls.

Unable to track down the phone through the ‘Find my iPhone’ application, the victim noticed – through iCloud which automatically backs up the phone – that her phone’s text messaging was being used by the crooks, who were texting out photos and lewd messages to her contacts.

Using a friend’s phone, the victim texted her stolen phone; “Hey, where are you? I have the money I owe you.”  The thieves responded “how much was it?” and she answered “dont you remember? 850.” The muggers then tried to outsmart their eventual foil, texting back “well I am busy at the summer youth employment place that I work, I will send two girls to pick it up.”

A meeting was then set up for later that day at 5:00pm. When the girls arrived three detectives assigned to the case arrested them.

The girl, 16, who committed the assault was arrested and charged with the theft and the other, even younger, was released into the custody of her parents due to her age.