Police sought a man in an iPhone theft at a casino, and a man is accused of stealing iPads from a company that had just fired him,, all in this week’s Apple Crime Blotter.

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series on the world of Apple-related crime.

Man in Best Buy line has iPhone stolen

A man waiting in line for nearly 40 hours at a West Hollywood Best Buy for a new Pokemon card release had his iPhone 17 Plus stolen, although he later tracked it and got it back.

According to WeHo Online, the man got in line on the afternoon of Monday the 14th for the release of Pokemon’s 30th anniversary trading cards, and was still in line on the 16th. At 7 a.m., it was reported to police that the iPhone had been stolen.

The man gave police permission to track the device, and police determined that the thief had dropped it. The man got his iPhone back and declined to press charges.

Man sought for theft of iPhone from casino

Carson City Sheriff’s Office in Nevada is looking for a man who they say stole an iPhone from a customer at the Nugget Casino.

2 News reports the theft took place August 17, and the alleged thief was “last seen wearing a purple sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, purple-and-black Nike shoes and a white headband.”

Man accused of stealing 30 iPads from company that fired him

A 43-year-old man from Hialeah, Fla., has been arrested for stealing 30 iPads, valued at $12,000, from a business that had fired him earlier that day.

According to NBC Miami, police say the theft happened on September 4, when an employee recognized the man as he was entering the warehouse. Even though the man was wearing a mask, the owner of the business was also able to recognize him on surveillance video.

The report said the man had been fired for not showing up for work the previous two days. It was later discovered he had pawned some of the iPads shortly after the theft.

iPhone left in Porsche helps catch a scammer

An elderly Connecticut woman had nearly $28,000 stolen in an identity theft scam, although an iPhone left in a Porsche led to the scammer’s arrest.

CT Post explains a scammer told the 80-year-old woman her Social Security number had been compromised, using a fake “Apple Security” alert. The man on the phone told her that she would need to pay $27,975, in cash left in a shoebox, to get a new Social Security number.

A witness provided a license plate number of a Porsche used in the scam. An iPhone left in the car was traced back to the man who was later arrested.

AirPods signal leads police to stolen car in New Jersey

Police in Englewood, N.J., arrested a man after they followed the signal from a pair of AirPods to track a stolen car.

According to News 12, police eventually found the man carrying the AirPods, after which he “made several disparaging comments and threatened one of the officers.”

He was hit with several charges, including burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, terroristic threats, resisting arrest and possession of burglary tools.

Man put on Walmart vest to steal Apple Watches, police say

A 42-year-old man walked into a Walmart store in Sarasota, Fla., put on a Walmart vest in order to impersonate a store employee, in an attempt to steal from the store.

That didn’t work, as he got out only with the vest. However, he later used that vest in a different Walmart to steal three Apple Watches, police said.

WWSB reports police caught up with him entering his vehicle, which they searched, turning up the watches and a gun. He was charged with grand theft, a felon in possession of a firearm, and burglary of an occupied structure.

Verbal disturbance report leads to arrest for thefts of iPad Pro and AirPods

A 19-year-old North Carolina man has been charged with multiple felonies after he allegedly broke into the victim’s vehicle and took an iPad Pro, AirPods, a wallet, a purse, and medication.

According to Fox Carolina, police pinged the AirPods to the man’s residence. After a verbal altercation between the man and the victim, the sheriff’s office arrived, recovered the items, and arrested the man.

Police said evidence from the man’s phone “supports the allegations of theft.” He was hit with charges of felony breaking and entering a motor vehicle, felony larceny, and felony possession of stolen goods/property.

Man arrested for AirTag stalking, threats

Police in Ohio arrested a man on charges that he used an AirTag to stalk a woman.

TiffinOhio.net writes the woman told police that the man had been following her and placed the device on her car, in addition to making threats.

The man was charged with menacing by stalking, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Man arrested in Georgia for iPhone counterfeiting

A man in Georgia, the country, was arrested for a rather crude form of iPhone counterfeiting. Police say he made a plastic object meant to resemble an iPhone and attempted to pawn it at a Tbilisi pawn shop.

According to Georgia Today, police determined that the man was part of a conspiracy that had pawned “six imitation mobile phone devices at different pawnshops, causing significant financial damage to the companies.”

He was charged with repeated fraud, attempted fraud, and the production and use of forged documents, the Interior Ministry told the outlet.

Military aircraft were already in the air this spring when U.S. officials made an alarming discovery: The intelligence driving an armed operation against a Chinese vessel had been hallucinated by an AI chatbot. The operation was aborted at the last minute, narrowly averting a potential conflict with China, CNN reported on Friday.

The episode underscores a growing concern among military officials and outside experts: As decision-makers lean more heavily on AI, the errors these systems produce can travel up the chain of command before being questioned.

The intelligence report, which circulated during the war with Iran, said the vessel was carrying components for a nuclear weapons program.

The false intelligence originated with a Special Operations Command analyst who queried an AI chatbot to synthesize open source data with classified signals intelligence. The chatbot misidentified the ship’s cargo manifest. The analyst then used the tool a second time to format the erroneous findings into an official-looking summary, which was circulated across command channels.

The near-miss comes as the U.S. military races to integrate AI to accelerate decision-making and maintain its edge over China. The Pentagon has described AI as delivering a significant advantage in speeding up its kill chain so commanders can respond in the right time. But the same speed that makes AI attractive may also allow hallucinations with insufficient human oversight.

“It’s important for service members to understand the uncertainty inherent to LLMs,” said Jake Steckler, research scholar at GovAI and veteran U.S. Army officer, in a written response to TechCrunch. “But it’s especially critical for any decisions that could lead to use of force, like targeting, intelligence analysis, or operational planning. There are life and death consequences for those decisions.” 

Still, Steckler says, the incident should serve as a call to add more safeguards to AI, not a reason to avoid it. “These tools can be useful in the right contexts and with the right safeguards in place,” he said. “But prioritizing adoption speed over all else will likely lead to incidents that only make service members lose trust in these systems, which ultimately is only going to slow adoption.”

A federal judge in Los Angeles has tentatively refused to lift the consent decree imposed on Musical.ly, the app ByteDance bought and turned into TikTok. Vlad Savov and Josh Sisco reported the ruling for Bloomberg, which said Judge George H. Wu intends to keep oversight of the company’s privacy practices.

Wu wrote that the order imposed obligations neither TikTok nor the government had shown to be obviated. The ruling is tentative and can change.

Why $100m is riding on it

The Justice Department announced the $400m settlement in August, resolving a children’s privacy case it filed in 2024. The structure is the part worth reading closely.

TikTok pays $300m immediately. The remaining $100m falls due only on entry of an order vacating the Musical.ly decree.

So a quarter of the headline figure is contingent on a court agreeing to stop supervising the company. Read one way, the government negotiated an extra $100m if it could deliver that. Read the other, release from oversight was worth $100m to TikTok.

What the 2019 order actually did

The Federal Trade Commission settled with Musical.ly in February 2019 for $5.7m, then the largest children’s privacy penalty it had obtained. The money was the smaller part.

The decree required the company to comply with the children’s privacy law going forward, take offline every video made by a user under 13, and destroy improperly collected data or obtain parental consent for it.

Those are continuing obligations enforceable by a court. The sum now offered to end them is roughly seventeen times the original penalty.

The government argued for ending it

The Justice Department’s own announcement made the case. It said TikTok had undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions and privacy practices since the complaint was filed.

Those developments, it argued, had materially advanced the public interests underlying the litigation. That is an enforcement agency telling a court its supervision is no longer necessary.

Wu has tentatively disagreed with the party that brought the case. TNW reported the settlement in August, including the conditional structure now in question.

Why a judge might be unpersuaded

The record since 2019 is not thin. A Texas judge found TikTok liable for telling parents its app was safe for children while knowing it was not.

There is also the question of what the company did with a fix it already had. A sealed document showed TikTok withheld a safety feature from 15 million US users by design, keeping them as a control group.

None of that is before Wu in this proceeding. It is the context in which a court decides whether a company’s compliance improvements have made judicial supervision redundant.

The money in proportion

$400m is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained under the children’s privacy statute, which says more about the statute than the sum. Penalties are capped per violation and the law dates from 1998.

Compare the exposure elsewhere. Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle a youth safety case brought by 29 states, roughly forty times as much.

State consumer protection law and product liability claims have proved more expensive than the federal privacy statute written for the era of the family computer.

The European position is the opposite

Brussels is adding supervision rather than removing it. The European Commission has charged TikTok with failing to protect children under the Digital Services Act.

The structural difference matters more than the amounts. A DSA proceeding produces continuing obligations under a regulator, where a US settlement converts conduct into a payment and, if the court agrees, an exit.

That is why the tentative ruling is interesting beyond this case. The judge is the only actor in the American process holding the supervisory line.

What is not decided

TikTok has admitted nothing. The Justice Department states plainly that the resolved claims are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability.

The $300m is not affected. If the vacatur is finally refused, the government collects less and the 2019 obligations continue.

What to watch

Watch whether the tentative ruling becomes final, and what the parties file in response. A tentative ruling is an invitation to argue, and both sides have a reason to.

Watch whether the compliance terms in the settlement are treated as a substitute for the decree. The government says they strengthen age controls and parental oversight, and a court that keeps the older order will have both running at once.

An AI-generated intelligence error reportedly brought the US military dangerously close to a confrontation with China after a false report claimed that a Chinese ship was transporting components linked to a nuclear weapons programme.

According to a CNN investigation published on September 18, 2026, the report circulated within the US military during the war with Iran. The intelligence triggered preparations to intercept the vessel, with armed personnel reportedly ready to board it and military aircraft already airborne.

Officials only discovered the problem shortly before the planned operation. A deeper review revealed that an analyst had used an AI chatbot to interpret intelligence about the ship’s cargo, and the system had incorrectly identified the materials being transported. One source described the report as “entirely false” and said it had “almost started a war.”

How an AI error reached a military intelligence report

The incident reportedly began when a special operations command analyst queried a chatbot about intelligence concerning the ship’s manifest. The AI system combined open-source information with classified signals intelligence and reached an inaccurate conclusion about the cargo.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a formal intelligence report, which was circulated to military officials. CNN could not establish whether the chatbot was a commercial product or a government-developed tool.

The episode highlights a major problem with using AI in military decision-making: an incorrect answer can quickly move from a digital system into real-world operations.

Should AI be trusted with sensitive military decisions?

The incident raises a fundamental question: should AI be used in sensitive military procedures where a single error could escalate into conflict? AI can process intelligence rapidly, but inaccurate outputs, limited transparency and unclear accountability create serious risks.

Security experts from the US and China have called for safeguards covering nuclear systems, critical cyber operations and meaningful human oversight.

Discussions at the Xiangshan Forum also highlighted concerns about automated military responses escalating faster than humans can intervene. AI may support military analysis, but decisions involving force, nuclear systems or potential confrontation require rigorous verification, clear accountability and meaningful human control.

AI adoption raises questions about military safeguards

The US military is rapidly expanding its use of AI, including for intelligence analysis, target selection, logistics and battlefield decisions. Defence officials argue that adopting the technology quickly is necessary to remain competitive with potential adversaries.

However, the military’s AI systems reportedly operate across different departments with varying tools and safety standards. Officials told CNN that there is no single set of standards governing how AI-generated information is verified.

For the public, the incident raises questions about how much authority should be given to AI when decisions could have serious consequences. Even when humans remain involved, speed and misplaced confidence can increase the risk of mistakes.

The next steps could include closer scrutiny of AI-assisted intelligence reports and stronger verification requirements, particularly when information is used for military targeting or operations involving other countries. CNN also reported calls for an investigation into the faulty report, suggesting that accountability and safeguards could become central to the wider debate over military AI.

New Apple CEO John Ternus welcomed buyers of the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York on Friday, and it’s likely to be just the first of several major product launches for the former hardware lead’s first year in the top job.

Dressed in a dark gray shirt and blue jeans, Ternus immediately took to taking selfies, giving handshakes and signing phone boxes for the hundreds of fans who chose to preorder the new iPhone or Apple Watch. 

Ternus, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, took a casual and personable approach to the launch — even gently laughing as one excited Apple fan accidentally dropped his iPhone 17 Pro Max onto the concrete while walking into the store.

“It’s fine, it’s got a little ding, no crack, thank you, Ceramic Shield,” Dallen Frutchey, 18, from Virginia, said about the accidental drop just ahead of moving his data to his new iPhone 18 Pro Max. This is his fourth time attending one of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store openings, where he had met prior CEO Tim Cook a number of times. At today’s event, he got a selfie with Ternus just before the phone drop.

“I’m excited to have someone who is down in the details with the products working on things now,” Frutchey said, wearing a blue sweater that matched his new glacier blue phone.

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The very first person to come out of the Apple store — Harry Sun, 21, from New Jersey — walked out with a burgundy phone while wearing a Believe pin from the Apple TV show Ted Lasso. Eric Morgan, the second person in line, came all the way from Guatemala. He was buying several phones for his family, who also made the trip but were staying at their hotel, away from the iPhone launch-day madness.

The glacier blue hue appeared to be an early crowd favorite at this store, and Apple’s flagship location had a number of visible changes to mark the occasion. The outside of the store had a color blend of burgundy along with that shade of blue — giving no love to the more traditional silver and black color variants that are also available for the 18 Pro and Pro Max.

Inside, the Apple store took on more of a party vibe as it filled with the crowds that had been waiting outside. A DJ booth spinning Lady Gaga songs blasted in front of a large blue carpet area that served as a showroom for the new phones, as well as the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4.

At the opposite end of the store, without many passersby, a small photography exhibit featuring photos taken on the iPhone 18 Pro was on display in an area that formerly served as the Apple HomePod demo area. We will see over the next few months whether new products will take over that real estate, since today’s event also marks a shift in how Apple conducts its iPhone launches.

Apple’s set to do at least one more store launch like this when the iPhone Duo goes on sale on Oct. 23 — marking the company’s first entry into the foldable phone space. It’s also rumored to be launching a number of new home entertainment products, with the decreased floor space for the HomePod possibly hinting at a relaunch of the speaker now that the new Siri AI assistant is rolling out to the iPhone 15 Pro and later.

And that’s not to mention the rumors hinting that a non-Pro iPhone 18 and an iPhone Air sequel may be set up for a spring launch, anchoring what could be a new annual launch event early in the year to contrast with premium phones coming later in Apple’s typical September window.

So while this is the first iPhone launch under Ternus, it’s likely that several more of these are to come over the next year.

Bridget Carey contributed to this story.

Mike Sorrentino

Senior Editor

Mike Sorrentino is a Senior Editor for Mobile, covering phones, texting apps and smartwatches — obsessing about how we can make the most of them. Mike also keeps an eye out on the movie and toy industry, and outside of work enjoys biking and pizza making.

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Google Creative Lab published Gemma Translator back in August 2026 as a voice box that never phones home. Alan Yam, Shashwath Santosh, and Dan Motzenbecker built it with help from Google Antigravity, then posted the code, model scripts, and 3D-print files on GitHub under Apache 2.0. You talk into a microphone. Moonshine turns the recording into text. Gemma 4 E2B, running locally through LiteRT-LM, translates that text. Moonshine speaks the other language from a speaker. After the first download, the radio can stay off.

Jadaie Lin modified the same setup to work on PiSugar’s Whisplay HAT+. The board is roughly the same size as a Raspberry Pi 5, measuring around 2.8 inches, but it also has some serious hardware, such as a 640 x 480 DSI touchscreen, two microphones and speakers, and a few motion sensors. The original Google setup required a separate kiosk panel (480 by 320), a USB microphone, a speaker, a push-to-talk button, and a rotary knob to select the language to use. Lin completed the entire process on a Pi 5 with only one hat put on top of it.

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Audio turns up on the onboard mics, Moonshine does its magic with some sophisticated transcription, Gemma handles the translation, and the twin speakers return the outcome to you. There’s a small retro-terminal-style web UI in React and Vite that is fed via a Python API on port 3000. This displays two discussion lanes, allowing you to sit down in front of the tablet with a friend in separate languages and chat.

Lin relocated all of the old controls on the touchscreen and placed the language switching in a convenient settings panel. He also included timing to demonstrate how long each portion of the chat takes: listen, translate, and then speak.

Gemma 4 E2B runs in LiteRT-LM and lives in memory, with a useful system prompt stored in the key-value cache. Tokens are transferred to the browser via server-sent events, and the UI refreshes in real time as the discussion progresses. Finished phrases are fed into the speech queue. Context resets after 3200 tokens, as there is a 4096 token limit, thus extended conversations do not simply stop working. By default, the translator loads models for Chinese and English.

To set everything up, you’ll need Python 3.10 or newer, Node 18, or newer, an 8GB Pi 5, and a one-time model fetch from Hugging Face. After that, the device will happily run without the radio, which is ideal for travel, classrooms, and other situations where you don’t want your speech to sit on someone else’s servers. Lin is treating the translation as the first app for Whisplay HAT+, and there is a wait list and a Discord channel established up while the board is still being distributed to clients. The code is available at on the Github page, and it’s basically a fork of google-gemma/gemma-translator, so you can see how everything works.

If your security camera shows offline on your phone, do not reset it immediately. First determine whether the failure is at the camera, your home network, the internet connection, the phone app, or an intermediate recorder or base station, then fix only the affected layer.

First, Find Out What Is Actually Offline

An “offline” message tells you that part of the viewing path has failed, but it does not always identify which part. The camera may have lost power or Wi-Fi, your router may have lost internet access, the manufacturer’s online service may be unreachable, or the problem may exist only on your phone.

Start with the broadest distinction. If other phones, laptops and smart devices also cannot reach the internet through your home Wi-Fi, troubleshoot the router or internet connection before changing the camera. Google makes the same distinction in its Nest camera connection guidance: an offline Nest camera cannot stream live video or save new video to the cloud, and Google first recommends checking whether other devices can use the home network.

If the camera still works on a local monitor, Network Video Recorder (NVR), or another phone, the camera itself may not be fully offline. The problem is more likely somewhere in the remote-viewing or phone-side path.

The table below helps isolate the failure before you start changing settings.

If the camera has never worked on a phone before, confirm the correct setup for monitoring a security camera from your phone before treating the problem as a new offline fault.

If the Camera Works on Home Wi-Fi but Not on Mobile Data

This symptom is especially useful because it shows that at least part of the camera’s local path still works. The problem is more likely to involve remote access, the vendor’s cloud or peer-to-peer service, the phone’s mobile connection, or the account rather than basic camera power.

Turn Wi-Fi off on the phone and first confirm that ordinary websites load over mobile data. Then reopen the camera app and make sure you are still signed into the correct account. If the manufacturer publishes a service-status page, check it before changing router settings.

Do not add port-forwarding rules merely because remote viewing stopped. Many modern camera ecosystems use manufacturer-supported cloud or peer-to-peer paths and do not require you to expose a camera management port directly to the internet. A feed that works at home but not over mobile data points toward the security camera remote-access path rather than an immediate hardware failure.

If restoring access appears to require reopening old router exposure, review how to secure IP cameras and CCTV recorders from remote-access risks before reversing security controls simply to make the feed load again.

If the Camera Keeps Going Offline and Coming Back

An intermittent camera is different from one that is completely unreachable. Repeated disconnects often point toward marginal signal quality, interference, unstable power, network congestion or a configuration problem rather than a permanently failed camera.

Special Cases: Recorders, Base Stations and Cellular Cameras

Not every security camera connects directly to your router and then to the manufacturer’s online service. Some systems introduce another device or another network between the camera and your phone, which changes what “offline” can mean.

NVRs and base stations

If several cameras feed an NVR or base station, check that shared device before treating every camera as faulty. The recorder may have lost its Ethernet connection, internet access, account session or power while the cameras themselves continue operating locally.

Some ecosystems also mix connection methods. The practical point is to identify whether your cameras communicate directly with the router or depend on an NVR, hub, base station or similar intermediary before deciding which device to restart or reset.

Cellular security cameras

A 4G or other cellular camera adds a separate connection path. If it goes offline, Wi-Fi troubleshooting may be irrelevant. Check camera power, the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) status where applicable, the associated data service and usable cellular coverage according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

A cellular camera that has power but no usable mobile-network connection may still be inaccessible remotely, just as a Wi-Fi camera with no internet path can be unavailable from your phone.

Do Not Factory-Reset the Camera Too Early

A factory reset can be useful when configuration is genuinely corrupted, but it is a poor first diagnostic step. It can force you to pair the camera again, re-enter network details, restore settings and regain physical access to the device.

Warning
!Before a factory reset, identify the exact model, record any configuration you need to reproduce, preserve footage when the vendor provides a supported way to do so, and use only that model’s documented reset procedure. Some systems can delete stored history or require complete re-enrollment after a reset.

Current vendor troubleshooting reflects this cautious order. Google’s Nest camera Wi-Fi troubleshooting places factory reset after less destructive connection checks and warns that a reset permanently deletes the camera’s video history. Wyze likewise places reset after power, network and other troubleshooting steps in its current offline-camera guidance.

Does “Offline” Mean Your Recordings Are Gone?

Not necessarily. Live remote viewing and recording are separate functions, and the outcome depends on where the camera stores video.

A cloud-dependent camera normally needs an internet path to upload new footage to its cloud service. Google states that an offline Nest camera cannot save new video to the cloud. That behavior should not be generalized into a claim that every camera loses all footage whenever internet access fails.

A camera using a microSD card or an NVR may continue recording locally during some internet failures, but only if the camera, recorder, power and local path required by that system are still operating. Conversely, a complete camera power loss prevents the camera from recording regardless of whether the phone app can connect.

After restoring connectivity, verify the actual storage destination and timeline instead of assuming that an offline notification either erased all footage or guaranteed that local recording continued.

How to Confirm the Camera Is Really Back Online

Do not stop troubleshooting merely because the offline badge disappears. Verify the functions you actually depend on, especially if the problem involved remote access or recording.

Bottom Line

When a security camera shows offline on your phone, diagnose the connection path before changing configuration. Check power first, then the wider internet connection, the affected scope, the phone and app, the camera’s local network link, any shared recorder or base station, and supported software updates.

Restart the layer that evidence points to, and leave a factory reset for last. That approach is more likely to identify the actual fault without erasing settings or creating a second problem while trying to fix the first.

Four years ago, I moved back to Texas from California. After two weeks of living here, I realized we were going to have to do something about the mosquitoes. In the 25 years I’d been gone, they seemed to have grown larger, more intelligent, and much thirstier. My skin had become a bepoxed nightmare within days.

I immediately embarked on a mission to do something, anything, about the problem, quickly resorting to paying a local company to send a guy with a pesticide-blasting cannon strapped to his back to the house once every three weeks. The cannon, used to blast all the foliage on the property, was expensive—four figures yearly—and very effective at warding off bugs … for a mere 48 to 72 hours after each spraying, after which it would wear off and the mosquitoes would return with bloodthirsty vengeance.

It took two years for me to find something better, and I wrote about it extensively for WIRED. Thermacell is a leader in mosquito abatement, and its LIV Smart Mosquito Repellent System is the company’s top-tier product. While it produces various small-scale repellers designed for personal use, LIV is a different animal that is installed semi-permanently around the area you want to protect. You fire it up when you need it, then shut it down when you’re safely inside.

Now two years after that review, Thermacell has upgraded most of the LIV components (only the cabling remains the same) and dubbed the system LIV 2.0. The company recently provided me with all the new hardware so I could test whether and how the technology had improved.

Similar Story, Updated Look

Conceptually, you won’t find any big twists in LIV 2.0. The brains of the system include one or more Wi-Fi-connected control hubs. These plug into wall power and connect via lengths of cable to multiple pesticide-emitting repellers laid out in a daisy chain, which you arrange in a perimeter around the area you’re trying to protect (in my case, the swimming pool). Repellers can be placed up to 20 feet apart from each other, and each contains a replaceable vial of the chemical metofluthrin, which mosquitoes detest (though, take note, it doesn’t typically kill them). With the original LIV, I used two hubs and five repellers to ring my pool. This year I added a sixth repeller to enhance coverage in one corner where I worried mosquitoes were sneaking through a hole in the vaporous fence.

Photograph: Christopher Null

CoreFX founder and CEO Denis Neville is a food science graduate from University College Cork.

Irish-founded US biotech CoreFX has chosen Cork’s Teagasc Moorepark as its European headquarters for R&D and commercial expansion efforts.

CoreFX develops additive powders for the health and wellness sector that claims to improve nutrient availability, absorption and impact. The business operates across North America and Europe, with three facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin, US.

The new operation in Cork will help CoreFX accelerate technologies that improve shelf life in nutritional supplements, the company said. Details of the company’s investment were undisclosed. CoreFX, however, said that the new Irish facility represents a “significant milestone” in its long-term global strategy.

Ireland was selected for its globally recognised strengths in food science, biotechnology and access to scientific talent, CoreFX said.

“Returning to Ireland to establish our European headquarters is personally meaningful, but this decision was driven by much more than my own roots,” said CoreFX founder and CEO Denis Neville. Neville is a University College Cork graduate in food science and technology who previously served as a commercial director at Kerry Americas.

“Ireland has become one of the world’s leading centres for food science, biotechnology, and innovation.

“By combining the scientific excellence of Teagasc Moorepark with Enterprise Ireland’s vision and support, we are creating an innovation platform that will accelerate how breakthrough nutritional technologies move from research into commercial reality for customers across Europe and beyond.” The Irish operation launches with a team of three scientists.

“This is a strategically important investment for Ireland,” said Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, TD. “CoreFX’s decision to invest and open this facility further positions Ireland internationally as a hub for biotechnology and food science”.

Mark Christal, the executive director at Enterprise Ireland said: “Since 2023, Enterprise Ireland has supported the company’s growth strategy, and this new European headquarters – developed alongside Teagasc Moorepark – represents the next stage of that journey. We look forward to seeing the team and business grow from here.”

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