Purse stolen with AirTag inside, need tips to find it

First, if you haven't already, I strongly suggest you do the following things:

1. Place your AirTag in Lost Mode.
2. Change your Apple ID password.
3. Contact the local law enforcement agency and report your purse as stolen
4. Contact each of your credit card institutions and report your cards have been stolen.
5. If you have check books in your purse, contact the financial institution and report that they were stolen,

Ok, with all that done, let's set your expectations with recovering your AirTag/purse. Keep the following in mind;

• Your AirTag MUST be associated with your Apple ID. This should have been done when you initially paired it with your iPhone. It will be too late to do so now if it wasn't already done BEFORE the purse was stolen.
• When an AirTag is outside the Bluetooth range (30-40') of your iPhone, it relies on the Apple's Find My network (which consists of literally millions of other iPhones) to relay it ID, along with those iPhone's GPS location to the Apple servers over the Internet. For this to work, there must be another iPhone nearby the tag.
• If the thief finds the tag, they can do a number of things to disable it. Once disabled, it will not appear in the Find My app on your iPhone.
• Should they not find it after a certain length of time 6-24 hrs, it will randomly beep. Of course, this will alert the thief to look for it.
• Similarly, if they have an iPhone, they will be alerted that there is an AirTag nearby. This too will alert them and they will be offered an opportunity to have it play a sound ... again, making it easier for them to find.

The bottom line? The AirTags were NOT designed as anti-theft devices. At best, they could help you locate a missing or misplaced item. In addition, should it show up, I strongly discourage you from retrieving it, but to leave that to local law enforcement.

Sorry, I wish I had a better set of answers for you as I truly understand the amount of stress you are going through right now.

Ref:

• Find your lost Apple device or AirTag with Find My - Apple Support
• Mark a device as lost in Find My on iPhone - Apple Support

renske49 wrote:

When it’s in the Find My network, how accurate is the location then?

When participating in the Find My network, as I mentioned the iPhone within Bluetooth range will relay the tag's ID, along with the phone's GPS location, to the Apple servers ... so it will be as accurate as GPS can be at that point.

Since you have an iPhone 14, it has "Precision Finding." According to Apple, that is even more accurate than GPS ... so once your phone gets within Bluetooth range, it will literally "guide" you to the tag with the Find My app.