Losing your phone can certainly be a traumatic experience. Unfortunately, it is an experience most of us have gone through once or twice. However, in most cases, we just realize we’ve somehow put our phone under the pillows, and we end up finding it rather quickly.
On the other hand, when you truly lose your phone – it might not be as simple to find it as you would expect it to be. Today, we’re going to talk to you about what are the things that you should do in case you lose your iPhone. Android users, we’re sorry. However, some of these tips will apply to you, too. In case you’re reading this as a “first response kit” in the event of losing your iPhone, we’re sorry for wasting your time. We’ll get straight to the point.
1. Give Yourself A Call
The first thing you should do in the event of losing your phone is give yourself a call. This might be tricky if you’re out and about and without a friend in sight, but you shouldn’t hesitate to ask a stranger if they could help you. So, find a way to give yourself a call. Sometimes, you’ll just hear it ring and realize you’ve simply misplaced it, and the disaster shall be averted.
However, even if it is not on you or near you, you can hope that someone has found your phone and is waiting for you to give it a call. This is what usually happens if you lose your phone in a public place, such as a coffee shop or a restaurant. Someone will have found your phone, and if they can’t unlock it and call your mom or dad, or whatever name seems familiar in the Contacts, they’ll simply sit by the phone and wait for it to ring.
Now, you’ll want to do this as quickly as possible because if your battery runs out and the phone turns off, that’s it. Unless the person who has found your phone knows the password – you won’t be able to reach yourself.
2. Remotely Lock Your Phone
Most of us keep a lot of essential and personal information on our phones. We have everything on there – from sensitive pictures to the bank account information and so on. In case you lose your phone, it is essential that you prevent anyone from accessing that information once they get a hold of your phone.
We assume that you do have a password-protected phone, Face ID set up and all that security jazz, but you can never be too cautious. If you’ve given yourself a call and no one is answering, there is a good chance you’ll never see your phone again. It’s either still hidden and lost somewhere, or the person who has found it has decided to keep your phone for themselves.
Either way, you’ll want to remotely lock your phone. All you have to do is log into Find My iPhone account from another device and manually lock everything up. Naturally, this won’t be possible if you haven’t already set up Find My iPhone, but we sure hope you did.
3. Locate Your Device
Once you’ve locked your phone, you can begin tracing it. You have two options here. You can either go with a tracing app like find-my-phone, or you can once again tap into Find My iPhone. Both of these should help you out in locating your phone. Every iPhone can be traced through GPS locating service or simply through a phone number.
Once again, this will depend on whether you have previously set up a tracking app or Find My iPhone. If you haven’t, unfortunately, you won’t be able to do this.
4. Report It
Another thing that you should do if you can’t seem to find your phone is report it lost or stolen. At this point, it is far more likely that your phone has been stolen rather than lost. Unless you’ve been in nature, it is quite possible that someone has already found your phone but have simply decided to keep it rather than return it to you.
Whatever the case may be, you should report that you suspect that your phone has been stolen. This may seem like a reach, but if you do this – you might actually get your phone back. iPhone thieves rarely keep the phones to themselves. They often try and sell them, and fortunately, when you try to sell a phone, especially to a shop, they will run the serial number check, which will let them know whether they’re dealing with a stolen device or not. At that point, police will be alerted, and you might get your phone back.
5. Log Out Of Everything
Another thing you should do right after you notice your phone missing is log out of everything. If you’ve set up the right things beforehand, you could easily gain remote access to your device, and you could log out of every social media account, email account, bank account, or any other account that you’ve been logged into.
This should prevent more damage from being done. For instance, someone could access your Apple Pay account and go on a shopping spree with your hard-earned money.
6. Cancel Your Service
In the event of you being unable to retrieve or find your device, you should probably go and suspend your service. The last thing you’d want to happen is to keep paying your phone bills when you don’t even have the phone in your possession. After all, a phone bill is not a small expense, right?
7. Factory Reset
In the end, the last thing you should do (if you have to) is wipe your device. It might be painful, but sometimes this is the last resort. Log into your phone from another device using your credentials, and just delete everything. This might be the last resort, but sometimes, that’s all you can do.
Conclusion:
There you have it. Those were the seven things you should do if you lose your iPhone. Hopefully, you’ve found this to be helpful.