After attending a stag in the central province of Hunan, China, Zou Bin realized that his iPhone was missing; he finally pieced together that the phone had actually been stolen from him while he shared a taxi with the thief.

Zou works in the bar industry which reportedly has strong ties to organized crime. The Daily Mail reports that Zou began bombarding the cell with threatening texts demanding the thief return it to a supplied address.

He wrote in one text message: "I know you are the man who sat beside me. I can assure you that I will find you."

"Look through the contact numbers in my mobile and you will know what trade I am in," he added.

"Send me back the phone to the address below if you are sensible."

It worked - several days later he received letter containing his SIM card and 11 pages of carefully handwritten contact numbers according to China's Xinhua state news agency.

One user of a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, posted: "What a sympathetic and faithful thief, one who values professional ethics."

It was probably more likely that the threat rang true to the thief, and rather than test it out he figured handwriting 11 pages of contacts was far less painful than the alternative.