Two men say they were each robbed of tens of thousands of dollars after going to the same Atlanta sports bar on different nights by criminals who gained access to their phones.
Charlie Zeanah, 27, and Micah Brown, 34, said they were each robbed of more than $30,000 after visiting Five Paces Inn, in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. Zeanah said he was robbed last week, and Brown last year.
The men said they believe the thieves either used their unconscious faces to unlock their iPhones with facial recognition technology or acquired their passcodes without their permission. Zeanah and Brown said they didn’t know each other before the crimes took place.
Zeanah, who owns an appliance company, said he visited Five Paces Inn — a sprawling dive bar with live music — by himself on Saturday after getting separated from friends at a bar across the street. Speaking with an unknown woman was the last thing Zeanah said he remembers before waking up in the backseat of a moving, unfamiliar car, unable to speak.
“It was like I was physically there, but not mentally,” Zeanah said. “But I was still in my head like, ‘What are we doing?’ but I couldn’t act.”
Zeanah said he vaguely recalls being in the car with two men and a woman — all strangers — who seemed to know one another. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the car stopped in the parking lot of what appeared to be an apartment complex, he said. Some time later, Zeanah said one of the men pinned him down in the parking lot and began taking his belongings, including his wallet, jewelry and cellphone.
The 27-year-old said he next remembers fleeing. He said for the next hour and a half he stopped in and out of gas stations alongside the same four-lane road in an unfamiliar neighborhood, begging for someone to call him an Uber. Eventually, an unknown man offered Zeanah a ride home at around 6 in the morning.
At home, Zeanah quickly learned that roughly $30,000 had been transferred out of his Mercury…
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