A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

I know this is useful (for something), but I'm stuck on the plot holes in the motivating story...

Why didn't they replace the battery when the app complained?

How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway?

If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what? A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment. You could try to get the police to do it, but that's going to take more time, during which the thief is even more likely to ditch the AirTag.

Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device. They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.

Come to latam and you'll see some intense confrontation when something gets stolen. I was in a hostel when someone broke into lockers and they tracked him to the a bus station and got all their stuff back + dude in handcuffs to police station.

I searched Google maps for Latam but could only find an airline. Where is this?