Traveling to a foreign country, I never thought that I would have my phone stolen.  I was very watchful in Florence and Venice.  These were the places where I was most likely to get pick pocketed.  Although this was not enough.  In Milan, as I was sitting on a bench like seat, I had my phone out next to me tucked beside my thigh.  I was using it fairly often and taking photos.  I had an iPhone 7 plus with 128 gigabytes of storage.  It was a nice phone.  It was while I was sitting there that my phone was stolen.  I believe that the thief was watching me set it down and pick it up ever so often and new that I was not paying too close attention to the people around me.  None of the people that were around me looked too shady.  We were in a wealthy part of the city.  There were skyscrapers, businesses and a nice water fountain.  Although this story isn’t about me, its about how you can react if you phone gets stolen.  This is really only helpful for iPhones also, I do not really know anything about other phones.

 

Step 1: Don’t Panic

This is just a phone, it’s not the end of the world, you didn’t die, you only lost a piece of metal. Find someone else that has an iPhone and data so that you can take the necessary steps to protect your phone.

Step 2: Is it really lost?

Go to find my iPhone and issue a sound request, just incase it wasn’t stolen, but is just lost or misplaced.  You will also be able to see it’s location on there too. When my phone was stolen, I spent at least 5 minutes looking for my phone around the family open place where I was sitting.

Step 3: Erase the phone.

As much as this may sound painful, sometimes our phones contain very important information such as credit card information, contact information, bank account information and whatnot.  When you log into Find My iPhone, you can choose the option to erase the phone. By doing this you prevent anyone getting your personal information that is valuable and useful.

Step 4: If someone says they found your phone via a text message with a sketchy link that looks like it’s from apple, don’t click on it, or type anything in.

After I had arrived back to the U.S. I weird text message was sent to all my emergency contacts, which the thieves would have had access too even if my phone was locked.  It was something like this. “Spencer, your phone has been found, please log into this URL, this URL was something like apple-icloud.com.  After talking to an apple representative, I found out that Apple does not use this link and that it was a scam to get your account password.  Don’t type in your password to this website!!!!!

Step 5: In fact, change your password.

If you have another apple device with the same Apple ID, such as an iPad on you, you can easily change your Apple ID by going to Settings > The account thing (this is literally the first thing besides the search bar) > passwords and security > change password > and then you change your password.  After it changes, it will prompt you to sign out of all devices other than the one your on, click yes.  This I important so that when and if your phone reconnects to the internet, the thieves will have a harder time getting into it.

Step 6: Call your phone carrier and Apple.

Since your phone may still have service, it is important to get the service disconnected, borrow someone’s phone and tell your service provider that your phone was stolen.  Next, report the stolen phone to Apple, so that the phone cannot be used again.  Also ask apple to check your account for spooky activity.

Step 7: Prevention

The best thing you can do to fix stuff like this is to prevent it, keep your guard up even in nice parts of town and don’t be like me and set your phone next to you, always keep it close to your body, or in your pocket.  But just in case for some reason your phone does get stolen there are some steps you can take at home to minimize the loss.

Step 8:  Encryption

iPhones have the ability to be encrypted.  This means that they can have an extra layer of security added to them to make sure that nobody except for really really specialized people can get into your phone.  99.999% of the people that steal phones probably cannot break though an encrypted iPhone.   To encrypt your iPhone, sync your iPhone to iTunes, on the sync page, there should be an option to encrypt it, simply check it, set a password and put it on a piece of paper somewhere safe.  After you’ve encrypted it, put a good password on your phone.  I kept a 9 digit password on my phone, and I am glad that I did.

Step 9: Data Erase after 10 failed passcode attempts

You can also set up a feature that erases your data after 10 failed passcode attempts.  Don’t do this if you have friends that like to just mess with your phone and disable it by typing the wrong password.  Only do this if you can.  This extra feature provides extra security so that even if people do get your phone and disconnect it from the internet so that you cannot erase it remotely, it will most likely still be erased and your data will be safe.  This setting I believe can be found in the passwords section of your iPhone’s settings.

Step 11: 2 Factor Authentication

If you don’t have 2 factor authentication on, this is a big security feature that apple has, it means that you need 2 devices that you own to access your account rather than one.  To turn this on, go to http://appleid.apple.com, sign in and there should be a button to press to turn on two factor authentication, just follow the on screen prompts.

Step 12: Laugh

Laugh at the people who stole your phone.  If you follow these directions, encrypt your phone, set a good password, and keep tabs on your Apple ID, then you should be good and the phone that the thieves stole will probably get them nowhere.  The only thing they can really do is sell it for parts.  They won’t be able to use it after it is erased, because you need your account information to unlock the phone. So you can laugh at them knowing that the effort that you put into protecting your phone lead to them putting in basically worthless effort to steal a phone that is useless to them.

 

I hope this never happens to you, but if it does, I hope you are prepared.

Sincerely,

A Nerdy Computer Engineering Student.