iPhone stolen and then switched-off immediately

Dear Ishwar

Sorry to hear about your situation.

in my opinion I think Apple Cares quite a lot.

iCloud and Find my Iphone work hand in hand to secure device content in the event of loss / theft and also can be used as a tool to track the device.

Although you may not be able to track your phone at this point in time, you should remain reassured that all your personal content is secured. Although most of the parts can be sold , your motherboard cannot be tampered with.

I do advise that you do not alert the criminal by putting your iphone on lost mode or making it beep now, do not erase it either. The user will need to restore your iphone in order to remove any passwords you may have on the home screen.

once this happens , the iPhone will need to connect to the internet to activate itself of which , you can then track the location.

All the best

I will respectfully disagree with this advice.

"I do advise that you do not alert the criminal by putting your iphone on lost mode or making it beep now, do not erase it either.

The user will need to restore your iphone in order to remove any passwords you may have on the home screen. once this happens , the iPhone will need to connect to the internet to activate itself of which , you can then track the location."

The user who ends up, possibly trying to restore your phone to use it will NOT likely be the thief. It will be the party who purchased the phone from the thief. Is that who you are after?

If you are able to track the location, what will you do with this information? Go to the phone's location? Foolish. There have been numerous people killed trying to retrieve their device after finding it with Find My Phone. Tracking the location is great if you left it at a restaurant or between the cushions of a sofa.

I agree with LACAllen,

Putting the phone in Lost Mode does not prevent you from tracking the device. So, there is no reason not to do that. Playing a sound is not going to be helpful, true, but the whole point of Lost Mode is to further protect your device in the instance that you do not have a Lock Screen password on it. No action taken on the device via Find My iPhone in iCloud.com or on another device will be executed until the device is back online, so the thief would not be alerted to anything, and once it is online the command is executed immediately. There is no way to stop it...

Cheers,

GB

Not really. The only people you can sell Apple parts to are other thieves, and why would they be interested in parts? As LACAllen indicated, most of the time, these lowlifes sell your stolen device to some unsuspecting, uninformed person, who then comes to this forum asking how they can get past the Activation Lock.

If they are asking that question, that means that your device has to be online, so at that point you would see its location.

And Activation Lock has worked. After it was implemented, Apple Device thefts went down by almost 30%.

Sorry about you situation, though.

Best of luck,

GB

"After 10 days of being stolen, today I got a SMS message on my other phone (which I mentioned while putting iPhone6 on lost mode) that "Your lost iPhone 6 plus has been located today at : HH:MM at http://maps-fmipicloud.com". For some reason the website is not opening at this stage. Will keep trying."

DO NOT try and access that web site - it is almost assuredly a scam to steal your personal information. Apple does not track lost or stolen devices and will never contact anyone about one.

There is no legitimate source that will contact you, especially by text message, about your lost or stolen device. Nobody is tracking it for you so no trustworthy source will ever contact you about it.

Even if you put a contact message on it in lost mode, nobody is going to send you to a web link about it at a custom URL, not anybody with honest intentions of returning your phone at least.

BTW, find my iPhone is not and was never intended as an anti-theft feature, because of the very fact that any remote tracking feature can be disabled by any one of several simple methods. Find my iPhone is and always has been nothing more than a convenience feature to help people find lost phones and track friends and family locations.

Activation lock, which is tied to find my iPhone service but is a distinct iOS feature, is an anti-theft feature. As long as you leave that device in your list of tracked devices, nobody buy you can ever activate and use it again (assuming you also do not ever allow your iCloud password to be compromised).

The device will only be removed from your list of tracked devices if you remove it, or someone else with your iCloud account password logs in and removes it. Some posters here unfortunately made the mistake of removing it thinking that would erase it or disable it, so I just wanted to be clear that whether it shows as trackable or not, as long as it is listed in your iCloud devices, activation lock is enabled.

The phone has little value to the thief if you have enabled the Find My Phone feature, which places an activation lock on the device. They will not be able to use the phone in any way. Neither will any buyer they may find.

There really is little to no value for parts. The thief's only ace-in-the-hole is the greed of his potential buyers. They will offer the phone up, no questions asked, for a pittance, and run as the buyer begins to grasp how little value the locked phone has for him/her.

Little comfort I know. The sophisticated system is no match for a determined thief. We are, and always will be, responsible for the physical security of any personal possessions, regardless of their purchase price.

Hope can Apple or any other manufacturer of hand held devices keep them safe? There has been theft since time began.

Apple has no magical fix for this. What they have done is protect your data and make an attempt to reduce the value of stolen iPhones to some degree.

When, and maybe if, the buying public stops paying for locked phones, the system will "just work".