A FAMILY traced their 81-year-old mother’s stolen iPad to her carer’s home using an app they installed on the device.

The carer was cautioned by police after the device was discovered at the bottom of her bin bag,

The daughter says when the family charged up the iPad Mini they found the carer had attempted to sign into her Facebook account.

The carer then admitted to taking the Apple product from the mother’s home in Malvern.

The daughter said: “I thought ‘I can try and track it’ with FindMyiPhone thinking it would not be on.

“It came up and it was only two miles down the road and had three per cent battery left. I thought I’d better go look as once the battery is gone I won’t be able to see where it is.

“I ended up in front of her house, I noted the number of the house and then went back home.”

The daughter then rang her brother to ask who might have taken it and when he thought back to the day he remembered it could have been the carer.

They then checked the address of the carer and found it was the same place as where they traced the device to.

“The thing that bothered me most was we are not there and we need the carer to look after our mother,” the daughter said.

The woman was in the mother’s home for 24 hours as a substitute for the normal carer, who had an emergency appointment.

She was suspended from the care company as soon as the daughter reported the incident to them.

The iPad was originally bought by the daughter for the family and for anyone at her mother’s house to use.

She installed the tracking application as a result of losing her devices while living in two different countries.

Her brother told her the iPad was lost while she was abroad and when she arrived back in the UK 10 days later she could not find the device.

After tracking it and the subsequent police search, the daughter asked for a community settlement as she did not want to press charges.

A police spokesman confirmed an iPad Mini was reported as stolen from a Malvern property on Friday, November 4.

Constable Jon Hand said: “Tracking options, which are available to locate mobile devices, can be useful when they go missing. Thankfully in this case it was utilised by relatives to locate the device. This enabled the police to recover it and return it to the owner following the conclusion of the investigation.”

The police recovered the device and cautioned a 47-year-old woman from Malvern in relation to the incident.