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baryon

macrumors 68040
Oct 3, 2009
3,880
2,941
The insurance wasn't on the phone, it was for their home. Many (most?) home insurance policies cover theft. The phone was stolen from their home in a break-in; thus, the cost of replacing it was covered under their home insurance.

That is awesome, really useful indeed!
 

andrew050703

macrumors regular
Feb 27, 2006
150
0
Portsmouth, U.K
I've had a similar thing with my phone - I bought it with a new SIM then used a PAC code to port my old number over (UK).

If my iphone decides to iMessage someone, it'll use the number that came with the phone. If it sends a regular text, it uses my ported number! If anyone rings or texts either number it will come through to me, but my number varies when I ring out.

Any help on resolving this would be VERY greatly appreciated....
 

dotme

macrumors 65816
Oct 18, 2011
1,193
255
Iowa
Happy to see this issue get some media attention. I've seen enough reports on MacRumors forums to know it is a problem that Apple needs to address. I'm just surprised that they didn't anticipate the issue of stolen and sold phones when building iMessage in the first place.
 

xorjo

macrumors member
Oct 19, 2011
60
10
So basically to stop this, remove the sim, then restore and never put that sim back in, correct?

yes that's correct. the moment you insert the sim card, you're screwed. which is stupid really.
 

dotme

macrumors 65816
Oct 18, 2011
1,193
255
Iowa
So basically to stop this, remove the sim, then restore and never put that sim back in, correct?
Yes, assuming you are dealing with a nice, cooperative thief willing to do that for you after he's stolen your phone.
 

prowlmedia

Suspended
Jan 26, 2010
1,589
813
London
Well if that is the case... of course it has to be fixed...

But this could be awesome for stolen phones. If iMessage is linked to the UUID Apple could create database of stolen phones and

a) send out iMessages/texts "This phone is stolen" etc
b) Deny service

I do think that it's something apple could allow - continue to track a stolen phone even if it's been wiped.

It would need a transfer of ownership online form if you sell it or recycle it. Like with a car.
 

shotts56

macrumors 6502
Sep 23, 2008
391
64
Scotland
Its absolutely astonishing that Apple released something without thinking of the consequences of the slight off-chance that people may change phones. Honestly, does nobody think of these things ?

Its like the antenna thing last year. The test phones worked great on campus where there is a great signal. Did nobody think to test them elsewhere ?

It makes you wonder what the thousands of people who work there actually do all day.
 

wiz329

macrumors 6502a
Apr 19, 2010
509
96
To a American or Canadian ear, "burgled" sounds like something made-up through a bit of whimsical word-play.

The key difference with your example is that "robber", the noun, is derived from "rob", the verb. (Yes, it's an historical thing.)

With "burglar", the noun came first -- it's not derived from "burgle"; rather, "burgle" is a back-formation based upon it.

But back-formations are much more the exception than the norm when it comes to deriving verbs from English nouns. The more customary way to derive a verb is to add -ize (or -ise) to the end. Thus, "burglarize".

What's interesting is how, when American and British English really started to diverge, "burglar" was a part of the lexicon but a verb form of the word was not. The route each took in doing so is perfectly legitimate -- neither inherently more "right" than the other -- but a century later, the alternate word from the other side of the pond seems silly, for both sides.

Of course, one can question the necessity of any verb form, given lots of alternate words like rob, stole, broke into, etc. Off the top of my head, I'd say burglarize / burgle are more specific in their connotation, used normally in the passive voice, to refer to the specific act of person(s) entering a building (typically a domicile), in secret and without permission, and stealing items from within.

Ex:
"I was robbed" versus "I was burglarized". In the absence of any other context, the latter paints more detailed picture -- we can safely assume several more details about how and where the theft occurred from "burglarized" than we could from "robbed".

What the hell.
 

BeardedOrc

macrumors member
Oct 19, 2011
86
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

People will just sweep this stuff under the rug again and forget about it. It's Apple that we are talking about and can do no wrong. LOL
 
Its absolutely astonishing that Apple released something without thinking of the consequences of the slight off-chance that people may change phones. Honestly, does nobody think of these things ?

Its like the antenna thing last year. The test phones worked great on campus where there is a great signal. Did nobody think to test them elsewhere ?

It makes you wonder what the thousands of people who work there actually do all day.

I'm sure they did think about that, and I'm sure they did also test the phones outside of campus.. otherwise how did one get 'found/stolen'?? There is just perhaps a test case that wasn't noticed during run up to the release of iMessage. It happens, it's very easy to miss something when writing apps.
 

pjo

macrumors regular
Feb 20, 2006
124
1
I posted about this long time ago, when the iphone 4s was just released. I found the solution. Change the phone number.

I'd call this a kludge/work-acround rather than a solution. For many reasons some people go to great lengths to maintain their phone number(s).
 

576316

macrumors 601
May 19, 2011
4,056
2,556
Remote Wipe??

I've always wondered something about "Remote Wipe". Can thieves who obtain a remotely wiped iPhone re-sync it and have a fully working iPhone? Because surely it just becomes a factory restored iPhone?

Would love an answer.
 

rmwebs

macrumors 68040
Apr 6, 2007
3,140
0
I had a weird iMessage thing happen last night. My wife and I sent each other an iMessage at ~the exact~ same time and my message did not go through. Guess it still has some bugs left to be worked out.

Technical details - Between an iPhone4 & iPad2. Same iTunes account. iPad set up with separate email account. iPad did not get the message. Other than that, seemingly no other issues.

I'd try again in a couple of days - Apple's fake cloud is having problems due to them cocking up the global release of iTunes Match. Not sure if iMessage runs on the same servers (you would assume so) however.
 

h4ck

macrumors regular
May 26, 2006
193
54
i just bought an unlocked 4s, pulled my sim card out of it and when people message me on iMessage, it goes to the 4 (with no sim card installed) and the 4s. i would expect it to behave this way?
 

EBSkater

macrumors member
Aug 2, 2010
38
0
This is NOT just stolen phones.

I recently upgraded to a HTC Titan from a iPhone 4 last week. I did the upgrade through the AT&T .01 WP7 sale. I activated the Titan and when I did that, EVERYONE who still has an iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch who has ever sent me a text message before the switch, they are still going to my iPhone because of iMessaging. The iPhone has no service and no sim card installed. It is only on wi-fi and all of the texts go to it still.

I can send someone a SMS from my Titan and their response goes to my iPhone. It is super annoying and no one knows how to fix it.

IMO this is complete ******** really and it needs to be fixed. Currently I am a slave to this iPhone now :/

You ever bother to turn iMessage off on the iPhone? When I do that, I no longer get iMessages to that phone number. I hop between phones many times a week, and use iMessage on the iPhone when I use it, and have never had an issue with that.
 

sevimli

macrumors 6502a
Jun 26, 2007
727
64
ChiTown
Whats really sad is that 99.9% of the cellphone users that have an iPhone stolen doesn't know that the stollen phone is put back on the network, activated and is being used by someone else (ATT and Apple are making money off of your stollen phone) This happened to me, I filed a police report and spoke to Apple and ATT both and was told that the stollen iPhone
Was Not put on the Blacklist so it could not be used on the network anymore. The detective said that they could easily idetify if the the phone was back on the network from its imei#, but that they could not do so unless there was an investigation and that the iPhone could be used to solve a more serious crime. It seems that what ATT and Apple are allowing to happen is definatly a crime.
I even had an person at ATT tell me that when she first went to work for ATT that in one of her first staff meetings this stolen phone blacklist was brought up and they were told that this blacklist is no longer used. She has worked in other cell companys for years and the blacklist was always used to keep stollen phones from ever being used on the network again.What I think is Really insane is that when anyone activates an iPhone on iTunes or a person does this in the store, why doesn't ATT or Apples system see the
imei# as stollen and stop it from being used. I will tell you why more$$$$

Sad Stuff


This is from Wiki site

The IMEI number is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing the network in that country. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone's SIM is changed.

My iPhone4 got stolen, I've reported to every single authority. Nobody did care! In Europe networks ban the stolen phone's IMEI, that's it, no resale value left!
 

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,558
9,750
I'm a rolling stone.
My iPhone4 got stolen, I've reported to every single authority. Nobody did care! In Europe networks ban the stolen phone's IMEI, that's it, no resale value left!

Really?
Not where I am from in Europe, they just don't seem to care.

Edit : Oh, and there is Ebay, easy to sell it around the world.
Not that I agree with that.
 

CaptainCannabis

macrumors regular
Oct 29, 2007
172
0
iMessage is proving to be a real piece of s*. Messages are sometimes delayed for 15 min or more, and you receive them in batches. Pictures don't get sent correctly. The sync between the iMessage on an iPhone and the same iMessage on an iPad is completely ****ed up. Sometimes you receive messages on the iPad and got to wait 20 min till they appear on the iPhone. You have to turn off iMessage on your iPad if you want to receive messages on your iPhone at the correct instant and not 20 minutes later. Sometimes the same thing happens, but this time the roles are switched: the message is received on the iPhone first and 20 minutes later on the iPad... Man... Feels like I want to switch to Blackberry again now that they are starting to catch up thanks to their new Bold and Torch... or even switch to Android: a platform that has caught up and stepped on Apple to be at the front of the industry.
 

Googlyhead

macrumors 6502
Apr 19, 2010
484
282
I've always wondered something about "Remote Wipe". Can thieves who obtain a remotely wiped iPhone re-sync it and have a fully working iPhone? Because surely it just becomes a factory restored iPhone?

Would love an answer.

I'd also like to know if you can keep requesting a remote wipe - ie. keep erasing the stolen phone over and over again to cause maximum inconvenience for the undeserving new 'owner'.
 

garylapointe

macrumors 68000
Feb 19, 2006
1,886
1,245
Dearborn (Detroit), MI, USA
This used to happen with Sprint

When I used to have Sprint as a carrier, when I got new phones, my old phones would continue to get my text messages. I don't recall if they ever stopped because I sold them or turned them off (or had to return them if it was a drop ship / warranty issue).

I just always thought it was weird (i.e. makes no sense!), that the database continued to remember the old device AND the new one....

Gary
 

1239689

Suspended
Oct 24, 2007
199
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

This angle doesn't take identity theft or gathering of other personal information into account. I assume that's a bad thing? After all there is no control of which messages they get, presumably all of them. Which means any family or friends silly enough to message you something critical it can be acquired by the theif.

Also I would like to know why it sounds like the "new owner" at the end of tharticle sounds justified his annoyance. Or did I get the wrong tone?
 
Last edited by a moderator:

joeip77

macrumors newbie
Dec 15, 2011
13
0
ATT And Apple allowing stollen iPhones to to put back on the network Sad but True

Whats really sad is that 99.9% of the cellphone users that have an iPhone stolen doesn't know that the stollen phone can be put back on the network, activated and is being used by someone else (ATT and Apple are making money off of your stollen phone) This happened to me, I filed a police report and spoke to Apple and ATT both and was told that the stollen iPhone
Was Not put on the Blacklist so it could not be used on the network anymore. The detective said that they could easily idetify if the the phone was back on the network from its imei#, but that they could not do so unless there was an investigation and that the iPhone could be used to solve a more serious crime. It seems that what ATT and Apple are allowing to happen is definatly a crime.
I even had an person at ATT tell me that when she first went to work for ATT that in one of her first staff meetings this stolen phone blacklist was brought up and they were told that this blacklist is no longer used. She has worked in other cell companys for years and the blacklist was always used to keep stollen phones from ever being used on the network again.What I think is Really insane is that when anyone activates an iPhone on iTunes or a person does this in the store, why doesn't ATT or Apples system see the
imei# as stollen and stop it from being used. I will tell you why more$$$$

Sad Stuff


This is from Wiki site

The IMEI number is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing the network in that country. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone's SIM is changed.

----------

ATT And Apple allowing stollen iPhones to to put back on the network

ATT And Apple allowing stollen iPhones to to put back on the network
Whats really sad is that 99.9% of the cellphone users that have an iPhone stolen doesn't know that there stollen iPhone can be put back on the network, activated and is being used by someone else (ATT and Apple are making money off of your stollen phone) This happened to me, I filed a police report and spoke to Apple and ATT both and was told that the stollen iPhone
Was Not put on the Blacklist so it could not be used on the network anymore. The detective said that they could easily idetify if the the phone was back on the network from its imei#, but that they could not do so unless there was an investigation and that the iPhone could be used to solve a more serious crime. It seems that what ATT and Apple are allowing to happen is definatly a crime.
I even had an person at ATT tell me that when she first went to work for ATT that in one of her first staff meetings this stolen phone blacklist was brought up and they were told that this blacklist is no longer used. She has worked in other cell companys for years and the blacklist was always used to keep stollen phones from ever being used on the network again.What I think is Really insane is that when anyone activates an iPhone on iTunes or a person does this in the store, why doesn't ATT or Apples system see the
imei# as stollen and stop it from being used. I will tell you why more$$$$

Sad Stuff

This is how Suppose to work.
This is from Wiki site

The IMEI number is used by the GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing the network in that country. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone's SIM is changed.
 

farleysmaster

macrumors 6502a
Feb 8, 2008
814
184
London, UK
This is NOT just stolen phones.

I recently upgraded to a HTC Titan from a iPhone 4 last week. I did the upgrade through the AT&T .01 WP7 sale. I activated the Titan and when I did that, EVERYONE who still has an iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch who has ever sent me a text message before the switch, they are still going to my iPhone because of iMessaging. The iPhone has no service and no sim card installed. It is only on wi-fi and all of the texts go to it still.

I can send someone a SMS from my Titan and their response goes to my iPhone. It is super annoying and no one knows how to fix it.

IMO this is complete ******** really and it needs to be fixed. Currently I am a slave to this iPhone now :/

Can you not turn off iMessage in settings?

(edit: oops just saw this was suggested)
 
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