When your iPhone is stolen, it can feel like you’ve lost a big part of your life. In many cases, a stolen phone is never recovered, but there are steps you can take to give yourself a better chance of recovering your device.
If you own an iPhone, a good first step is to download the free app Find My iPhone and sync it with your iTunes/iCloud account. In the unfortunate event that it is stolen, you will be able to log in from any computer and use the device’s GPS to find its location. It is imperative that you do this as soon as you realize your phone is missing, as particularly crafty and experienced thieves will delete or disable any tracking apps.
If you don’t have a tracking app or are slow to react, and your tracking apps have been disabled, most major service providers offer a tracking system as a paid add-on to your monthly plan. For an additional $5 per month, Sprint will let the primary account holder track the location of all phones on his or her plan.
This is exactly what our laptop repair manager, Eric Kautzi, used when his wife’s phone was recently stolen.
“When my wife’s phone was stolen, we used this plan to track the exact address of the phone when the thief turned it on,” Kautzi said. “I called the police and they accompanied me to his house, but unfortunately (and predictably) he denied taking it and the police could not enter his house without more substantial just cause. The phone was not recovered.”
As Kautzi’s experience demonstrates, installing an app is not an absolute fix for finding a lost phone. However, it does put you in a better position. If you manage to retrieve your device, you may find that it was damaged in the time it was away from you. In that unfortunate event, iResQ’s iPhone repair services are here to help.