Do you remember when an employee walked into a bar with a priceless phone prototype and lost it? Well, it kind of happened again.

But this time it wasn’t at the Gourmet Haus Staudtt — a German biergarten in Redwood City, California — although it did happen in the actual country of Germany.

(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

According to tech blog Techunalt, Honor employee Moritz Schneider lost the smartphone prototype after a short trip to see his family in Düsseldorf during Easter. He claims that the prototype was “tucked away inside his backpack” but, when he arrived home and went on to charge it, it had disappeared.

Today, the German branch of Honor — a Huawei brand — posted a reward notice on Twitter, saying that it will pay 5,000 euro ($5,600) to the person who returns the prototype, no questions asked.

The company says that the phone was inside a camouflage case — just like the iPhone 4 — when it went missing on the ICE 1125 departing at 6:06am from Düsseldorf.

We know that Honor will present its new Honor 20 series in London next month, so maybe that’s the phone this marketing guy lost. Or perhaps, like some Honor fans said in social network Weibo, this may be all a trick to get some news buzz around the new phone. It’s not a crazy idea — after all, companies like Honor tend to copy everything, even Apple’s blunders.