In yr phone, sendin you the wrong location. (Photo: Biz Journal)

As anyone who has used a map app recently will tell you, GPS location is still a pretty imperfect science. Sadly, we don't think that will be any comfort to Wayne Dobson, a 59-year-old Las Vegas man who has fallen victim to a glitch with Sprint Wireless's GPS technology. The problem has dispatched scores of people who lost their cell phones to his front door demanding he give them their phones back.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Sprint can track the location of a lost or stolen cell phone within 50 to 300 meters and send that information to law enforcement. But a glitch with Sprint is pinpointing Mr. Dobson's house as the epicenter of tons of stolen phones, even though he's had nothing to do with them. To make matters worse, when police triangulate 911 calls made from cell phones near his home, the glitch frequently makes it seem as if the call came from Mr. Dobson's house.

"Lucky me, huh," he told the Review-Journal, sounding kiiiind of like Eeyore. "I couldn't be the multimillion-dollar winner. No. I'd rather have that problem."

Mr. Dobson has resorted to putting a sign outside his house that reads, "NO LOST CELL PHONES!!" Dude doesn't have your phone, okay?

This is the kind of thing that would be really novel at first--an interesting story to tell your friends over dinner, perhaps--but get old realllly quickly. Mr. Dobson has resorted to sleeping by his door so he can shoo away angry people in search of their phones at all hours of the night.

Sprint says it is investigating the glitch, so it should be fixed in the next 10-20 years.

Here, he made an app for you. (Image Devdsp on Flickr

Mobile devices are a brave new frontier for cyber thieves, and the BBC reports malware creators are cashing in. Citing surveys by Lookout mobile security, the BBC states that sneaky cash-snatching apps have increased from 29 to 62 percent of all smartphone malware. Users acquire the thieving bugs when they ride into your phone on the backs of seemingly innocent apps:

Kevin Mahaffey, head of technology at Lookout, said phone fraudsters were increasingly using viruses that surreptitiously added charges to a user's bill to cash in.

Over the last few months, he said, Lookout had seen fraudsters stop experimenting with ways to steal cash and move on to large scale campaigns on networks where they knew they would succeed.

Mr. Mahaffey told the BBC that thieves are seeking "a repeatable, scalable" method for acquiring more money and once they have it, "they try to get as big as possible."

Lookout calls these kinds of apps "Crimeware" and says at the moment crimeware is becoming a big problem in Russia, China and India.

As if seeding phones with viruses that steal money isn't bad enough, though, the BBC's report concludes that crimeware could also help "artificially inflate the popularity of" advertisements or even a song, ultimately sending more money into the cyber-thieves' pockets.

So besides being a crime against all music, the next "Friday" could also end up secretly enriching the Russian mafia.