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What to Do If Your iPhone is Lost or Stolen
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I'm confused about Find My iPhone. I lost my iPad mini 2 about six months ago and my iphone 6 was stolen 3 months ago.
The ipad which was left in an airport departure lounge showed in Find My iPhone, but never showed a location. It disappeared from FMiP a couple of months ago. from The iPhone was erased a few days after being stolen. i didn't realise that erasing it, removed it from FMiP.
I've written off the devices, but I'm confused about a couple of iMessages sent a month or so after it was stolen. As below, in the same message, but 2 messages one addressed to me and the other to some guy with an unusual name who a search determined to be an Australian lawyer. The icloud links didn't reveal anything
Any idea what this means. Is it possible the Australian lawyer has my phone.
The ipad which was left in an airport departure lounge showed in Find My iPhone, but never showed a location. It disappeared from FMiP a couple of months ago. from The iPhone was erased a few days after being stolen. i didn't realise that erasing it, removed it from FMiP.
I've written off the devices, but I'm confused about a couple of iMessages sent a month or so after it was stolen. As below, in the same message, but 2 messages one addressed to me and the other to some guy with an unusual name who a search determined to be an Australian lawyer. The icloud links didn't reveal anything
Any idea what this means. Is it possible the Australian lawyer has my phone.
4. PUT A DANG PASSCODE ON YOUR PHONE. (or else the douche that stole it can potentially just reset your iCloud password and get around activation lock)
5. ALWAYS USE LOST MODE. there is a way for store managers to remove activation lock but not if its in lost mode. so using it protects you from the chance of someone finding a manager that will take a bribe
someone is phishing for your apple id details to turn off activation lock. Apple never asks you to log in etc
The worst thing is losing a Wi-Fi only iPad. My old iPad got stolen and for 2 weeks I couldn't track it. Then somehow the thief connected it to Wi-Fi and I got the location (I still don't know how, my iPad had a passcode). The police went to the location but said they couldn't find anything. I kept using Lost Mode to display messages on the iPad and a couple days later the iPad disappeared off the grid. It's been 1 1/2 years and I gave up long ago. Needless to say, my current iPad has a data plan.
Some Australian may have your Phone, but I doubt he is a lawyer. This looks like a phishing mail to get you Apple-id and password to unlock your Phone. I hope you didn't enter you credentials, but if you did you should change your password now!
Thieves are often not very bright. See my story below.
I believe the article said to call the cops. But that doesn't take away the benefit of Apple's system.
Right after the iPhone 5 came out, my daughter called me at about 1:00am one night in a panic that her brand new iPhone 5 had been stolen. She lives about 2.5 hours away. She said she was in a club dancing right next to her table and her wallet, keys, and phone were on the table. She looked away for a second and the phone disappeared.
I went into Find My iPhone and discovered that there were about 10 listings in there when we don't have that many phones, and they all had similar names. Turns out that if you don't keep this thing updated it remembers all the old devices you had in your account. We were striking out for about an hour... nothing showing. Turns out the thief had turned off the phone. Then all of a sudden it came on... a blip appeared on the map about 5 miles from where she was located and proceeded to move away from her.
Meanwhile, I had asked her to call the police to report it. An officer had arrived at her house and was talking to her. Keep in mind at the time she was a 20 something grad student living with 3 other female grad students, and this cop was a 20 something dude... so I'm guessing she got a lot more help than I would have gotten if I had called them.
So we keep watching her phone move away, and then it stopped moving and started kind of wandering around slowly in one area. I brought up Google maps and went to satellite view and saw that this was the parking lot of a gas station. I relayed the name and location of the gas station to the cop via my daughter. He said he's send a cruiser by there. At this point was about 3am, so not a lot of traffic at the gas station. They pulled up and found a guy standing in the parking lot. They questioned him and asked if he had an iPhone on him, which he pulled out of his pocket with my daughter's case still on it.. pink no less! She described the case and they retrieved the phone from the guy.
His story was that someone gave it to him... and that they were riding in a car and had an argument and kicked him out of the car, so that's why he was standing in a parking lot alone at 3am. No charges were pressed because the cops said it would be impossible to prove he actually was the guy that stole it. They brought her phone back to her at about 4:30am and case closed! So thank you Apple.
Now on the thing about turning it off and putting it into stolen mode. The idiot turned it off initially, but they after he got out of town he turned it back on. It was in stolen mode, but he must not have noticed. As we watched it, I was torn with whether to force a wipe. If I did that, then we would have not been able to track the phone any more. So that was the big dilemma to decide whether to wipe it or keep tracking it... risking that the thief noticed and turned it off. It worked out good for us that the thief was not very bright.
A very useful article! My phones locked up, but I imagine there are many that aren't.
I haven't researched this much but apparently you can get around a locked iPhone, and erase it so another person can use it. Granted the last I heard of this happening was a year ago on a local Facebook group where someone had bought a stolen iPod!
I haven't researched this much but apparently you can get around a locked iPhone, and erase it so another person can use it. Granted the last I heard of this happening was a year ago on a local Facebook group where someone had bought a stolen iPod!
I agree. Further, it should do everything it can to conserve battery power, so it doesn't die.
I doubt if it is a phishing attempt. It was stolen in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Here is the link.
http://www.icloud.com.lr1.at/?r=a626&
and sender: devices.lost@icloud.com
Well none of that looks like anything related to Apple officially. So pretty clearly a phishing attempt.
Yeah, but they'd use it for parts. I'd like to keep tracking my phone until the battery dies.
Are you saying that link doesn't take you to icloud.com? Keychain recognised it.
You guys are guessing.
You don't see the .lr1.at at the end of that URL? Or thst an @icloud.com email address is used when Apple's official email addresses are @apple.com?
The why has been pointed out a number of times. It's like looking at a watch that looks like a Rolex but says "Rolix" on it and somehow saying that it's the real thing.
Poor analogy and still not explanatory.
Anyway, I would have received an email notifying me of the phisher's log in.
Not that it matters. The phone is gone and my personal data is pretty worthless.
It's a good analogy as it demonstrates the underlying issue fairly clearly. And explanations have been provided--not an Apple URL/domain used and not an Apple corporate/official email used.
We had 2 laptops stolen out of my wife's van. We had "Net Nanny"-like software on them to discourage our kids from visiting the dark parts of the internet. When they were stolen we listed all internet sites as restricted. As soon as the thieves broke in and connected to the internet, it sent us an email with the IP address that the laptop was at.
We were in Seattle and the laptops ended up in Portland a day later. We found the ISP that owned that IP address and provided all this information to the police. Any guesses on whether we got our laptops back? That's right! They did nothing whatsoever to break up what was most likely an organized ring.
So, the moral of the story, don't expect the police to do jack **** when it comes to recovering your stuff. (And P.S., I did see your sarcasm tag.)
PS /s means sarcasm. The joke was that you couldn't call the apparently incompetent cops cause you no longer have an iPhone...
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I guess you overlooked that this was just a cheesy joke that you wouldn't be able to call the cops right away since you'd no longer have an iPhone to do so. How to make jokes more evident..
I don't know if iPhone parts are worth very much. And even if they caught the guy, if he no longer had the phone, the stupid legal system wouldn't force him to buy you another phone.
What I'd really it to do is pretend to be unlocked, let the guy use it, and record all his passwords so I can steal his bank account and everything.
Yes, I saw your /S as I indicated in my post, however joke=/=sarcasm. You made a joke but it was not sarcastic.
Sarcasm: "The use of strategies which, on the surface appear to be appropriate to the situation, but are meant to be taken as meaning the opposite in terms of face management."
Your joke used irony not sarcasm. That's why it is going to be misinterpreted, because as you meant it, it was not sarcastic but ironic.
I'm glad that your daughter found her iPhone, but it still doesn't change the fact that if the thief couldn't turn off the phone (if the sleep button gets deactivated) you were able to locate it much earlier. That's what I'm talking all about. And I can tell you the story of my dad. He forgot his iPhone in a restaurant and realized it after 5 minutes. When he turned back the phone wasn't there anymore. I tried to locate it, but the thief turned it off. So most thiefs will turn the phone immediately off.
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If the iPhone is put into the lost mode it automatically activates "battery safety mode". But all that is pointless if the thief can turn off the phone.