Recovering a Stolen Phone
December 19, 2016 1:02 PM Subscribe
My phone was stolen. I have video of them from the store we were both in when it was taken. I also have a Google Map that tracked the phone to an address within 20 meters. The account has been deactivated and phone has been locked but I'm told a good hacker can get in any phone. There is video on the phone that may be used in a medical malpractice case that is very important. So letting this whole thing go is not my first choice. I didn't call the theif or erase the phone but the locking process sent them another number with a request to call me.
I have a couple questions:
(1) How much help can I expect from the police if I give them what I have and file a police report? A stolen phone isn't a priority for them.
(2) Is there a way to connect their faces to the address?
(3) Despite the Internet success stories, I've heard the police advice against directly confronting a thief. If I can connect their face to the address, would they consider that enough to charge them and for me to get the phone back?
I have a couple questions:
(1) How much help can I expect from the police if I give them what I have and file a police report? A stolen phone isn't a priority for them.
(2) Is there a way to connect their faces to the address?
(3) Despite the Internet success stories, I've heard the police advice against directly confronting a thief. If I can connect their face to the address, would they consider that enough to charge them and for me to get the phone back?
1. You absolutely are not getting that phone back without the help of the police. As a longtime urbanite, my guess is that they won't care and/or just tell you to call your carrier, use your insurance, etc. But if you are interested in retrieving this phone as opposed to just replacing it, you have to start with the police. If you don't involve the police, it's your word against the thief's as to who stole from who.
2. Honestly, considering the teensy chance of getting your phone back (as tantalizing as I know it is), I would also report it stolen with your carrier and see what steps will be required to replace it as well as there are any deals or long-time customer offers or anything that might make replacing it more affordable if you didn't have insurance on it. Not saying you have to replace it as an alternative to calling the cops, but you might as well report it and see what the next steps are.
posted by Sara C. at 1:34 PM on December 19, 2016 [7 favorites]
2. Honestly, considering the teensy chance of getting your phone back (as tantalizing as I know it is), I would also report it stolen with your carrier and see what steps will be required to replace it as well as there are any deals or long-time customer offers or anything that might make replacing it more affordable if you didn't have insurance on it. Not saying you have to replace it as an alternative to calling the cops, but you might as well report it and see what the next steps are.
posted by Sara C. at 1:34 PM on December 19, 2016 [7 favorites]
If this were me, and I NEEDED that phone back, I would post a nice-sized reward for it, no questions asked. Join the local Facebook groups for your town/village/city and post on there. Post pictures or video of the thief and see if anyone recognizes them. Post on Craigslist in the Cell Phones section. Definitely file a police report and make plenty of noise about it.
posted by Slinga at 1:40 PM on December 19, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by Slinga at 1:40 PM on December 19, 2016 [8 favorites]
There was this question last year where I answered that my brother offered a reward and got his phone back. Good luck, I hope you get it back.
posted by stellathon at 2:12 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by stellathon at 2:12 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm told a good hacker can get in any phone
This is not true. But if it's locked, a thief is just going to try to pass it onto someone that would be able to wipe it back to the factory state, not try to get into it.
I have video of them from the store we were both in when it was taken.
What does this mean? Do you have video of them taking the phone or just footage of someone that was in the store at the same time as you that you're presuming took the phone?
How much help can I expect from the police if I give them what I have and file a police report? A stolen phone isn't a priority for them.
It will vary greatly depending on the local PD and what else they have going on at the moment.
posted by Candleman at 2:36 PM on December 19, 2016
This is not true. But if it's locked, a thief is just going to try to pass it onto someone that would be able to wipe it back to the factory state, not try to get into it.
I have video of them from the store we were both in when it was taken.
What does this mean? Do you have video of them taking the phone or just footage of someone that was in the store at the same time as you that you're presuming took the phone?
How much help can I expect from the police if I give them what I have and file a police report? A stolen phone isn't a priority for them.
It will vary greatly depending on the local PD and what else they have going on at the moment.
posted by Candleman at 2:36 PM on December 19, 2016
In the future it might be a good idea to have all of your photos/videos automatically back up to icloud, dropbox, or google photos. I do this with dropbox and it is seamless.
posted by k8t at 2:47 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by k8t at 2:47 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
My husband successfully got a phone back by offering a reward. I wouldn't pay for my own phone, myself, but it did work for him.
posted by thebrokedown at 3:21 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by thebrokedown at 3:21 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]
I offered a large reward for a laptop and ALMOST got it back when the police could not or would not help me. I got a call from a person who knew the thief's name and where they lived and could describe my laptop and the background image on it. Unfortunately when I gave the police this information they were not able to find the thief or my laptop (he was a drifter living in his car so not exactly easy to locate). Point being, the reward thing does work.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 4:37 PM on December 19, 2016
posted by treehorn+bunny at 4:37 PM on December 19, 2016
It's possible, but don't get your hopes up.
3 years ago I was visiting with a family member in the Bay Area when their home was burglarized. Among the items that were taken from the house were a number of small, fairly valuable items that belonged to me -- among them a mirrorless camera and an iPod Touch.
The police didn't seem much interested in doing more than filing a report -- semi-understandable, as this happened in a part of the East Bay where property crimes are less of a priority than the area's violent crime, which is non-negligible, and besides, there really wasn't much to go on..
That is, there wasn't much to go on until the following day, when a co-worker asked me why I was deleting all of the shared meetings in the calendar server. I wasn't, but it was easy to guess what was happening -- I hadn't set a PIN lock on my iPod and the thief was clearing out the appointments from the calendar app and was doing so manually, rather than wipe the device to its factory config (which they would have done had they been smart.) Anyway, we looked through the calendar server's logs and found the IP address from which the CalDav client was connecting. Reverse DNS lookup on the address yielded a hostname suggesting it was a Comcast residential ISP customer somewhere in Hayward. I contacted a friend who works in Comcast's DNS operations and, while they couldn't help me get the subscriber info, they told me where law enforcement could send a records request and how to submit it to get the necessary information back.
Knowing the police are busy and that petty property crimes are not a priority, I did as much as I could to gift-wrap the info for them. In addition to my burglary report, I got them a signed document from the director of operations at our company describing how the person(s) in possession of the device had unlawfully removed company data from a shared server. I prepared a records request for the Comcast subscriber info so that all the detective assigned to the case would have to do would be to sign it and fax it to the ISP. And I wrote a narrative describing the process we had used to pinpoint the IP address in question so that once the ISP records request was fulfilled the explanation could be used in support of a search warrant application.
And then.. nothing for six months. But then the detective originally assigned to the case left the police department and was replaced by a new one who inherited his case files. That guy, starting from a fresh pile of cases, read through the pile and looked for the ones which looked easiest to clear, and mine had clear directions on how to proceed with a few simple steps which should lead to the last known location of some of the stolen merchandise. So he called me, asked for clarification on one or two points, and then followed the trail to the ISP subscriber, got an address, requested a warrant from a judge, and they executed a raid on the location that had been identified.
By that time my iPod Touch and several other items were long gone but they did recover my camera, which was identifiable as mine because of a distinctive crack on the case. They also recovered items that they linked to other open burglary investigations, which was nice to hear. The person who was found in possession of the stolen items, who was believed to be the thief, in the end got a ridiculously inadequate sentence (I want to say 30 days? It was very low) but hey, I got my camera back, and we felt we'd scored at least a small victory.
One thing I did learn was very important is that it's vital that, in order to make a case, the police have to be able to definitely match any items they recover to your description, so the more precise you can be about things like make, model, serial number, distinguishing physical characteristics, etc, the more likely a case can be made against the thief and you can get your items back if all else goes well. But the odds are quite low, unless you can point directly to the person responsible and can interest law enforcement in the applicable jurisdiction. And even then, it's by no means a sure thing.
Good luck.
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:10 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]
3 years ago I was visiting with a family member in the Bay Area when their home was burglarized. Among the items that were taken from the house were a number of small, fairly valuable items that belonged to me -- among them a mirrorless camera and an iPod Touch.
The police didn't seem much interested in doing more than filing a report -- semi-understandable, as this happened in a part of the East Bay where property crimes are less of a priority than the area's violent crime, which is non-negligible, and besides, there really wasn't much to go on..
That is, there wasn't much to go on until the following day, when a co-worker asked me why I was deleting all of the shared meetings in the calendar server. I wasn't, but it was easy to guess what was happening -- I hadn't set a PIN lock on my iPod and the thief was clearing out the appointments from the calendar app and was doing so manually, rather than wipe the device to its factory config (which they would have done had they been smart.) Anyway, we looked through the calendar server's logs and found the IP address from which the CalDav client was connecting. Reverse DNS lookup on the address yielded a hostname suggesting it was a Comcast residential ISP customer somewhere in Hayward. I contacted a friend who works in Comcast's DNS operations and, while they couldn't help me get the subscriber info, they told me where law enforcement could send a records request and how to submit it to get the necessary information back.
Knowing the police are busy and that petty property crimes are not a priority, I did as much as I could to gift-wrap the info for them. In addition to my burglary report, I got them a signed document from the director of operations at our company describing how the person(s) in possession of the device had unlawfully removed company data from a shared server. I prepared a records request for the Comcast subscriber info so that all the detective assigned to the case would have to do would be to sign it and fax it to the ISP. And I wrote a narrative describing the process we had used to pinpoint the IP address in question so that once the ISP records request was fulfilled the explanation could be used in support of a search warrant application.
And then.. nothing for six months. But then the detective originally assigned to the case left the police department and was replaced by a new one who inherited his case files. That guy, starting from a fresh pile of cases, read through the pile and looked for the ones which looked easiest to clear, and mine had clear directions on how to proceed with a few simple steps which should lead to the last known location of some of the stolen merchandise. So he called me, asked for clarification on one or two points, and then followed the trail to the ISP subscriber, got an address, requested a warrant from a judge, and they executed a raid on the location that had been identified.
By that time my iPod Touch and several other items were long gone but they did recover my camera, which was identifiable as mine because of a distinctive crack on the case. They also recovered items that they linked to other open burglary investigations, which was nice to hear. The person who was found in possession of the stolen items, who was believed to be the thief, in the end got a ridiculously inadequate sentence (I want to say 30 days? It was very low) but hey, I got my camera back, and we felt we'd scored at least a small victory.
One thing I did learn was very important is that it's vital that, in order to make a case, the police have to be able to definitely match any items they recover to your description, so the more precise you can be about things like make, model, serial number, distinguishing physical characteristics, etc, the more likely a case can be made against the thief and you can get your items back if all else goes well. But the odds are quite low, unless you can point directly to the person responsible and can interest law enforcement in the applicable jurisdiction. And even then, it's by no means a sure thing.
Good luck.
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:10 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Phone recovered!
posted by CollectiveMind at 10:36 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CollectiveMind at 10:36 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Yay! How??
posted by Room 641-A at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2016
posted by Room 641-A at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Cranialtorque at 1:05 PM on December 19, 2016 [12 favorites]