On the other hand, the guy's lawyer does admit he was the one that found the phone, it's not likely Wired found the wrong person.

I don't think Wired is making any assumptions about the legal status of what he did.

Does that make it any less freaky that trawling Facebook is what led to this scoop? Well, admittedly no.

To me, "trawling Facebook" means using publicly available information. Pretending to be interested in friendship is "social engineering," which is a polite way of saying "lying."