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Stolen iPhone.. What are my options?

ckesten

ckesten

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 27, 2008
104
0
New York
Hello -

Last night my wife's bag was stolen at a restaurant and her 1 month old iPhone was in it. We kept trying to call it and people picked up kept cursing at us.

Called the police but they really can't do much on this.

Do we have any options with AT&T or Apple? Its a brand new contract, will they allow for her to add another line and get a new iPhone for $200 and let her cancel the line that she lost the phone while keeping her number?

Any kind of retro active insurance since its about a month old?

This sucks.. would appreciate any advice.

Thanks!
 
ckesten said:
Any kind of retro active insurance since its about a month old?
Click to expand...

That would be fraud: you have to insure before the event, not afterwards.

Your options are

1) claim on any insurance you already have that will pay out (household insurance might)

2) Pay full, unsubsidised price for a new phone
 
Retro-active insurance.....too funny! Sorry it happened, but that was just too great a target to resist!
 
Mines was stolen too.

Um I paid $300 for the one that got stolen with an upgrade it was a 32gb. Then I used my early upgrade and it was $400 for a 16gb.
 
Some credit cards insure against theft in the first 90 days. Check yours.
 
Not sure if you can, but I would file some kind of police report, just in case.

The odds are slim to none that you will get it back, but if your credit card has any theft protection you might be able to get a replacement for a small deductable after showing the police report as proof of theft. As others have stated, "retroactive" insurance is pretty much fraud as insurance is meant to protect against a future event. :)

You should be able to buy the "Early Upgrade" price for the iPhone and wouldn't have to pay the full-unsubsidized price, should be either $499 and $399 for the 32GB and 16GB models respectively.

Sorry your device got stolen!
 
If you didn't already have Mobile Me, sign up for the trial now, use my Find my iPhone to locate it (although I'd be awfully careful if you're going to go there and try and get it back) and wipe the data from the phone (assuming the thief hasn't already restored it as a new phone). At some point you also need to call your cell carrier and get them to disable the SIM so the thieves aren't racking up charges on your wife's account. I believe you'll want to do this after the Mobile Me stuff since I think once there's a new SIM in it, you won't be able to find it or wipe data.
 
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SnowDX said:
If you didn't already have Mobile Me, sign up for the trial now, use my Find my iPhone to locate it (although I'd be awfully careful if you're going to go there and try and get it back) and wipe the data from the phone (assuming the thief hasn't already restored it as a new phone). At some point you also need to call your cell carrier and get them to disable the SIM so the thieves aren't racking up charges on your wife's account. I believe you'll want to do this after the Mobile Me stuff since I think once there's a new SIM in it, you won't be able to find it or wipe data.
Click to expand...

I think you need to activate that on the phone before you can do that. At least that was the case on my 3G.

OP: go to AT&T and see if they will allow you to repurchase at the same price given that it's only 1 month old.
 
SnowDX said:
If you didn't already have Mobile Me, sign up for the trial now, use my Find my iPhone to locate it (although I'd be awfully careful if you're going to go there and try and get it back) and wipe the data from the phone (assuming the thief hasn't already restored it as a new phone). At some point you also need to call your cell carrier and get them to disable the SIM so the thieves aren't racking up charges on your wife's account. I believe you'll want to do this after the Mobile Me stuff since I think once there's a new SIM in it, you won't be able to find it or wipe data.
Click to expand...

Good idea on Mobile Me, but only works if you enable it on the iphone in question before it's stolen.

For the OP, you need to talk to AT&T and the Police. I'm living overseas right now, so I don't know AT&T's current policies on doing this, but they should be able to locate the phone by its IMEI number (which is printed on the OEM box) and either lock it out or send the location info to the police.
 
seajay96 said:
I'm living overseas right now, so I don't know AT&T's current policies on doing this, but they should be able to locate the phone by its IMEI number (which is printed on the OEM box) and either lock it out or send the location info to the police.
Click to expand...

They wont do any of that for any lost cellphone in the US.
They will tell you to buy another one, lost cause.
 
jessica. said:
I think you need to activate that on the phone before you can do that. At least that was the case on my 3G.
Click to expand...
Oh geez, really? I couldn't remember how it worked when I got Mobile Me. I thought maybe it just got the info on my devices from my iTunes account.

So, Mobile Me is not looking like an option. I guess the only thing to do now is to let the carrier know so they can disable the SIM.

ETA: okay, yes I am now remembering that I had to go into settings and turn it on for my iPhone and iPad. Sorry about that OP!
 
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Unfortunately MM charges up the wang for their "services" but it is truly worth it.
 
Surrix said:
Some credit cards insure against theft in the first 90 days. Check yours.
Click to expand...

This is probably your best option.

Also, make sure that your wife changes any passwords for email, facebook, banks, etc. that she may have entered on her iPhone. Sorry for your loss.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Retro-active insurance. LOLZ.
 
ucfgrad93 said:
Also, make sure that your wife changes any passwords for email, facebook, banks, etc. that she may have entered on her iPhone. Sorry for your loss.
Click to expand...

Very big +1 here. i think right now your most immediate concerns is disabling the phone so they don't rack up huge charges and making sure that any passwords that were stored on the phone get changed.

You want to do that as quickly as possible because the thieves (at least if she's unlucky enough to get ones that really know what they are doing) know that you will be doing that so will on their end be as quickly as possible trying to get that info to use while they still can. Who knows, maybe they're just opportunistic and will just sell the phone (but maybe the person they sell it to will be buying it for that kind of opportunity) or just take the cash but do you really want to chance you got the kind of thief that just wanted the cash vs. wants to milk the theft as much as possible?
 
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