My phone was pickpocketed at a train station 2 months ago and now I have alot of questions to be answered

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lsaacN wrote:

About a week after having my phone stolen, I received a message sent to MY NUMBER ( The same phone number on the stolen phone ) on whatsapp from a number claiming to be “apple support” and how my phone was found and requires me to prove ownership through a link, which I obviously did not open the link at all as it was well known this is a common tactic by the thief to get my apple id and remove activation lock. First question now is, how did the thief know MY phone number?

• Was your phone using a physical SIM card that the thief could remove and insert into another phone?
• Was your phone set to show your Medical ID on your Lock Screen, and if so, what information did you have in your Medical ID?

Alongside “apple support” messaging me, I also received a text from a separate number ( which is a business account and holds the identity of a laid person on whatsapp during the same day a few minutes after the “apple support” message asking “Hi, did you lost your handphone?”.

Now, my second question is, judging by these messages, can I really trust that these people messaging me are actually good samaritans who happened to find my phone and are willing to help give it back to me?

NO!!!

The first message from "Apple Support" is a textbook example of "a scam presented by criminals" (to borrow the phrase used by another person who posts here).

The fact that the WhatsApp message arrived just "a few minutes" later is EXTREMELY suspicious. My gut feeling would be that it is also from the criminal. Perhaps they wanted to arrange to meet you somewhere … like in some dark alley, where they would have a knife or gun, and you would have nothing. Or perhaps all they wanted was to scam you out of your credentials and/or scam you into clearing Activation Lock.

Fast forward about a week after my phone was stolen, the location of my phone on find my changed twice, the first time it showed it at a shopping complex, and the second time at the highway, and this would be the final time the location was updated before it went offline today, 2 months later

Now my third question is, why did the phone not erased if the location was updated and why did my phone suddenly went offline?”

For the phone to honor a remote Erase request, it needs to learn about the request. That requires a connection to the Internet.

Although the main Find My tracking mechanism requires a connection to the Internet, iPhones also can participate in Find My Network. There, the iPhone does not directly report its location. It sends Bluetooth transmissions every now and then, even when switched off, as long as it has battery power. If other Apple devices come close enough, they may hear the signal, and help to report the location of the phone using their own Location Services, and their own connections to the Internet.

Bluetooth is very short-range, so unless the phone is in a place where many other Apple devices are likely to pass close by (like in an airport or shopping mall), Find My Network might not yield a location.

But it is quite possible that if the thief had a personal iPhone, the thief's own iPhone "snitched" on the thief when the thief powered on your iPhone to try to get into it.

Any help or suggestions will be appreciated since many of my best pictures and memories were stored on that phone, and were not backed up due to my icloud storage being full.

If you were using iCloud Photos, some of your photos might have been synchronized to iCloud before your storage became full. You could log into https://www.icloud.com/ from just about any Web browser (on a Mac, Windows PC, Linux PC, even a ChromeBook) to see which ones made it.

Unfortunately, if your iCloud storage was full, and you were not manually backing up your phone in another way (by direct import to a Mac or PC), that implies that many of your "best pictures and memories" were stored only on the stolen phone. There is no way to retrieve them remotely. You'd have to get the phone back, stop the Erase request before the phone learned about it, and then hope that the thieves had not tried incorrect passcodes so many times that the phone had gone into a security lockdown that would force you to erase the phone to get back in.

Most stolen phones are not recovered – so odds are that any photos that existed only on that phone are gone.

All of the communications you’ve received are likely from criminals attempting to break into your phone AND takeover your AppleID as a “bonus”

A1: Presumably the phone contained a nanoSIM (?) Criminals routinely pull these quickly to determine YOUR phone number to use “later” in follow-up phishing attacks.

A2: A good samaritan would NOT have known YOUR number; they would have contacted you thru the number you provided in your “Lost” message.

Any contact to your phone is most likely a criminal attempting to spear-phish you.

A3: Your phone’s position can be reported by other devices in the area, even if it’s offline. You phone was possibly being factory reset (erased) at this same general time frame.

It’s also the point where the criminals would need your Apple Account password to clear the Activation Lock.

This may help --> Do's and Don'ts for lost iPhones - Switch… - Apple Community

many of my best pictures and memories were stored on that phone......

And that being the case, I am wondering why you did not take advantage of the opportunity to add more storage space on iCloud to protect that very valuable data.

Hopefully, you will remember to do this with your replacement phone.