Lost my iPhone few days ago. Since I was unable to connect the internet at the time, I immedeately
called the carrier to stop the service to it.
No ofcourse Find my iPhone shows that it is offline, and all the requested action are pending.
Would the phone appear to be online, even if someone put another sim-card into it ? And if so,
would the requested wipe and lock actions take place then ?
Thanks for answering !!!
If the phone has been turned off, restored and/or a new SIM installed and activated, the phone wil appear offline and you can't remotely do anything with it.
Of course, before losing it, you created a passcode lock so that no one else could access your data, right?
Find my iPhone has nothing at all to do with the SIM card. It is dependent on the credentials in the iCloud account settings. It is the AppleID and stored password for your iCloud account that allow the find my iphone software and the iCloud location server to talk to each other.
So, if they have done anything, like a restore as new, that wipes out your information, including your iCloud account, then it will not be findable.
If you did not have a passcode lock on it, and/or a passcode lock on restrictions with changes to accounts disabled, then they could merely go into your iCloud account settings and disable the find my iphone setting.
Yep, didn´t have a passcode.
So if they switch the SIM, they can use the phone with no problem, even I have filed a police report with the IMEI code ? Anyway, it´s still offline in Find my iPhone.
If they are trying to use the same carrier you had, and you reported the IMEI to the carrier, they should not be able to use the phone. If the phone is unlocked and the SIM card is from another carrier, likely they will be able to use it. There is no global IMEI blacklist of stolen phones shared between carriers.
Well, they deffinetly aren´t using the same carrier, because the phone was lost/stolen abroad. Strange, that this tracking system can´t find the phone by it´s IMEI code. To my understanding it is only way to identify the phone !! In other words, Find my iPhone is useless, if the phone is lost and you don´t have internet connection, or the thief is clever enough to turn trackin mode off. And carrier can do nothing about that? Just wondering, why the phones even have the IMEI number.. ?
The carrier can use it to block access too their network, but as has been stated before, if the phone is unlocked, the IMEI block cannot be used as the phone would function on any other network.
The IMEI is in place for a carrier to identify the phone on their network, not for the purposes of tracking (all phones have an IMEI, not just iPhones).
The phone can also be recognized by the Serial Number, which is largely what Find My iPhone works off, since the S/N is Apple's own number, not one generated by a carrier.
I'm not sure how you view Find My iPhone as useless? It was serving the function it was supposed to. If you didn't have internet connection, how is the service supposed to tell you what's going on? If the phone is turned off, it has no network connections, meaning it can't send or receive signals. And if the service is turned off, it's turned off, deactivated, which means the phone is no longer locatable.
No I just ment, that Find my iPhone seems to be useless after I called the carrier to stop the service. And so I did, because I was not able to access the internet(lousy german, "supposed to work in all rooms connections") at the time when I realized that the phone was not in my pocket.
I´m just wondering if and when the "new owner" of my phone has placed a new SIM card into the phone, and still it is not locatable. So, the IMEI code is only for use of carriers, and nothing more. No use in case the phone is lost.
Find My Phone is intended to find LOST, not stolen phones. To track by IMEI involves many legal and privacy issues, and you never will have that option. As it is, it works just fine, especially when the owner has the. basic common sence to set a passcode...
Then again, anything that doesn't work the way it occurs to you is "useless" by definition, right?
PkJ14 wrote:
Well, they deffinetly aren´t using the same carrier, because the phone was lost/stolen abroad. Strange, that this tracking system can´t find the phone by it´s IMEI code. To my understanding it is only way to identify the phone !! In other words, Find my iPhone is useless, if the phone is lost and you don´t have internet connection, or the thief is clever enough to turn trackin mode off. And carrier can do nothing about that? Just wondering, why the phones even have the IMEI number.. ?
Neither find my iPhone nor the IMEI are, or were ever intended as security features. The IMEI only exists so carriers can track individual devices to be able to bill them for useage (you have to have some way to uniquely identify each device hitting the network and assign it to an account). Find my iphone, and ANY internet tracking software, is really only a potentially useful convenience feature (and a limited one at that).
Your iPhone did have security features on it to protect your information, but you chose to ignore them. Really, I have little to no sympathy for people who refuse to use a passlock security code on their devices. Might as well have just pasted any confidential information that was on the phone on a public web page.
Security does come at the cost of ease and convience of use - always has and always will. But note that one of the key driving forces in smart phone theft is people looking for identity information, not for the phone itself. Millions of smart phones, with no security enabled on them, are stolen or lost every year, and every year identity theft grows by billions of dollars - it is not a coincidence.
Lost my iphone4S few days ago , even I have filed a police report with the IMEI code later on signed into icloud ,Find my iPhone shows that it is offline, and all the requested action,lost mode was pending , after some time the phone was switched on for few minutes the phone location got located & even the lost mode got activated but after that i never got any updates from that phone, still my iphone shows it is offline ..so is that possible if somone has restored & a new SIM is installed and activated in my iphone even if the lost mode is activated , if so how could i trace it
Lost iPhone, offline in Find my iPhone
