Mobile theft is a burning issue these days and it’s mainly because of the pricey handsets. Price for any standard smartphone is easily comparable to a month’s rent. It’s easy money for robbers, they can easily sell off stolen handsets at black markets for handsome price.

As a smartphone owner, there are some steps you can take but you can’t completely prevent your phone from being stolen. These steps are meant to help you find the phone after it is stolen.

The exact steps differ based on the manufacturer. For instance, iPhone has a nice ‘Find my phone’ feature which will relay the location information over cloud to iCloud account. The catch here is that this feature is not ON by default and many people aren’t aware of it. Even if you have turned it ON and the location services are turned OFF then it would be of no use.

Similarly, for android phones there is Android Device Manager which gives you the map trace of your phone. There are also online tools & apps which will give you the location of your device. All these methods make use of IMEI number of the device to do the tracking.

You can do the location tracing but there are also other things you should do immediately after the phone is stolen. Firstly, you should inform your mobile carrier about the theft. Once you have traced down the location of phone, you should also check if the IMEI is blacklisted. Use this blacklist checker tool to see if the IMEI is blacklisted and if it’s not then you should get it blacklisted so that the device will be useless for others.

Next, you should lodge a complaint with local authorities by providing them all the details and hope that they find it soon.

These were some things that you can do after the phone is stolen but there are few precautions which you can take to minimise the possibility of theft.

• Don’t leave your phone unattended at a public event or ceremony.
• Don’t keep your phone in car. Thieves can easily smash car’s window to grab the phone.
• Avoid taking your phones to gym. There are people from all walks of life at gym, so you should not take the risk
• Avoid taking calls at crowded places like trains or buses, thieves can steal it without you even knowing it. Most of the mobile theft cases happen in public transport.

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