I recently had my iPhone stolen while on a trip in Latin America. It seems that it was an organised group with a vast distribution network. I could follow their entire supply chain which spanned through entire Brazil, from south all the way to Salinopolis which is a beach city in the north of the country. Most probably they travelled through the airport with an entire bag of phones stolen during the carnival.
Putting my phone into a lost mode resulted in them getting my primary phone number which then later was used in a feeble attempt to scam me over WhatsApp. Pretending to be Apple's support, they sent me a phishing link trying to extract the PIN number of the phone. Every number they used (from DNS registration one to the ones they used on WhatsApp) was stolen from someone else before and reused. Funnily, given the domain registration dates they have been preparing for carnival for quite some time. Police wouldn't move a finger (I had a similar experience in UK when I had a Macbook stolen in a central London restaurant).
While Find My might be a useful tool if you forgot something at your friend's place, I doubt the probability of successful retrieval of a stolen phone is high. It's fun to track on a map but unfortunately Find My doesn't even provide a history of locations (!) where the device appeared - it's only the last approximate address where the device has been seen. The return to risk ratio of dressing up as a batman and trying to retrieve the device yourself is not the best, especially if it has been stolen by a "professional".
I have retrieved my wife's phone two times and my own once using Lost Mode. We are in NYC. Maybe I just got lucky or the universe is just smiling on me. I did give each of the do gooders some money and each of them initially tried to refuse it. There are kind, helpful people in the world.
When working at the Edinburgh Fringe, I once left my phone in a taxi, then went home and went to sleep pretty early. I was woken the next morning by flatmate banging loudly on the front door and holding my phone.
It turns out he didn't have his key, so had banged on the door for a while the previous night but I was too asleep to hear him and he had to sleep elsewhere. He'd also tried ringing me loads of times, and eventually someone in the back of the taxi found it and picked it up and my friend arranged with them to retrieve it.
> While Find My might be a useful tool if you forgot something at your friend's place, I doubt the probability of successful retrieval of a stolen phone is high.
What I hope is that some day most parts will have some form of authenticity verification built-in. Putting in stolen parts in another iPhone would just brick it and tell the holder to surrender it at the nearest Apple Store.
> Police wouldn't move a finger (I had a similar experience in UK when I had a Macbook stolen in a central London restaurant).
What I've been told by Brits living here in California is that certain crimes are simply not recorded by the police because it would make statistics look bad.
According to him this was, in part, because politicians were pushing for it due to Brexit.
> The return to risk ratio of dressing up as a batman and trying to retrieve the device yourself is not the best
In some places, the government will even charge you with a crime for doing so (after the police refused to investigate of course).
Apple really needs to do more to lock down parts on registered iPhones. The OS should completely refuse to function if you have a screen or battery from a stolen phone.
Putting my phone into a lost mode resulted in them getting my primary phone number which then later was used in a feeble attempt to scam me over WhatsApp. Pretending to be Apple's support, they sent me a phishing link trying to extract the PIN number of the phone. Every number they used (from DNS registration one to the ones they used on WhatsApp) was stolen from someone else before and reused. Funnily, given the domain registration dates they have been preparing for carnival for quite some time. Police wouldn't move a finger (I had a similar experience in UK when I had a Macbook stolen in a central London restaurant).
While Find My might be a useful tool if you forgot something at your friend's place, I doubt the probability of successful retrieval of a stolen phone is high. It's fun to track on a map but unfortunately Find My doesn't even provide a history of locations (!) where the device appeared - it's only the last approximate address where the device has been seen. The return to risk ratio of dressing up as a batman and trying to retrieve the device yourself is not the best, especially if it has been stolen by a "professional".