My iPhone was Stolen!

In the middle of a busy run-up to Noey’s birthday, something catastrophic happened: I lost my mobile phone.

For someone for whom the mobile phone is virtually an extension of an arm — yes, guilty as charged — to say that I was totally lost and disoriented is an understatement. And let’s not forget ANGRY.

What happened was this: On Friday morning a couple of week a go, I brought Meips for class at Safra Toa Payoh, as I usually do. I had my phone in my pocket to snap pics of her during class. After class, I took my phone out to check the time and saw that it was 10.51am. I must have put my phone back in my pocket though it was a subconscious act so I don’t remember exactly. I got our things, got Meips ready, walked out the door, picked her up, and carried her down the stairs to the Toast Box on the ground floor. After ordering, I started rummaging around for my phone as I wanted to give my helper a ring with instructions on cooking lunch. That was when I realised that MY PHONE WAS GONE.

I hastily paid up, got Meips and re-traced my steps back to Gymnademics, but found nothing. When I was at the gym, her teacher helpfully lent me his phone so that I could give myself a buzz to locate my phone. I tried but my call was directed straight to voicemail. My phone was off. My heart sank. Repeated tries yielded the same result. 

I knew then — in the short span of 8 minutes, some horrible, nasty, dishonest person had decided to keep my phone for himself.

I went downstairs to the security desk to leave my name, in the vain hope that my phone would be returned. I then had to leave to pick Noey from school after which I spent some time fruitlessly trying to use Find My iPhone to locate my mobile. I later also returned to Safra Toa Payoh to ask to check the CCTV to see if I could figure out what had happened, but was informed that there were protocols for that, and that only the police would be able to view the tape after I make a police report. Sigh.

Anyway, I’m just glad that I’m obsessive about transferring photos from my phone to my computer every few days. As such, I only lost about 2 days of pics. I would have been devastated if it had been more! And because I just did an upgrade to iOS7, my phone backup was only about a week old. I had a newer backup, but tragically iOS7 cannot run on the 3GS. Yes, it’s too old!

I’m now waiting for the 5S to be in stock before I do an upgrade. With the 3GS and stolen 4S, it looks like I’m continuing my trend of owning “S” series phones. 

Anyway, through this traumatic process, I learnt some lessons about what you can do if your phone is lost or stolen. While I hope this never happens to anyone, here are some tips in the event that it does.

1. Backup, backup, backup.

Obviously this is something you ought to be doing before anything untoward happens to your phone. I had the bad experience once of having my phone malfunction and have to be replaced. At that time, I didn’t backup regularly, and therefore lost a whole chunk of data. It was very painful. I now backup my phone on my computer at least every week or so, and faithfully transfer all my photos out to iPhoto every couple of days. Just sync with iTunes and a full backup will be stored on your computer. This will include your most important information — contacts, calendar entries, SMS and Whatsapp messages, photos and videos, and app information. Whew. I seldom delete messages and I remember the old days when the info couldn’t not be transferred from phone to phone, when I used to agonise over having to delete them all before upgrading and trading in my phone. I even have a word doc where I typed out the messages I wanted to keep! Thankfully I wouldn’t have to do that anymore these days.

Here’s a useful link from Apple Support:  How to Backup and Restore your iPhone.

2. Activate iCloud and Find my iPhone.

The alternative to backing up on the computer (which might also fail!) is to backup on iCloud. I didn’t do this mainly because I have way too much data on my phone – primarily photos – and each person only gets 5GB free storage. Obviously insufficient for my gazillion photos. But if you: (1) don’t have over 6,000 photos and videos on your phone like me, or (2) are willing to pay for additional iCloud storage, this is a good option. Better than a manual backup in fact, as iCloud will automatically backup every time you are connected to wifi. That’s very convenient as you can then rely on the phone to do the backing up for you.

Even if you don’t use iCloud for backup, you should still turn it on together with Find my iPhone. This app is specifically designed to help you locate a missing iDevice with another. With the latest version, you can remotely lock your screen, display a message with a contact number, lock your phone with an activation lock so that it would be more difficult for someone else to use your phone, and even remotely erase your info. I thought I did this correctly on my phone, but I don’t know, since I’m not getting any data. Definitely something I’m going to make sure I do right only new phone!

More information on this here: Find My iPhone, iPad and Mac.

3. Keep a record of your phone’s IMEI number. Or keep your iPhone box.

We’ve probably all heard of the IMEI number — the unique serial number of each and every mobile. Knowing this number is useful as you can block the phone from being used in the country. Take that, thief! I’ve given the IMEI number of my phone to the police. You can also inform your mobile carrier so they can put it on a blacklist.

More information at this link: What’s the Importance of the IMEI Number.

Something I’ve learnt: the IMEI number of an iPhone is on the barcode on the box. So it’s good news if you’re a box hoarder like me. 

4. Make a Police Report Online

I eventually made a police report about my lost, or rather, stolen phone, primarily because the security at Safra Toa Payoh had indicated that only the police would be allowed to view the CCTV after a report was made. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the time to do it quickly and only managed to make the report a few days later. On hindsight, I realise I should have made it immediately to up my chances of actually nabbing the thief. Also, perhaps with a report in hand, I might have been able to convince the security to let me have a look at the CCTV. It was only while sitting in the police station looking at the posters around me that I realised you can actually make a police report online. If I had known that, I could have gotten around to it way more quickly. Possibly even on the same day. So now I’m telling you.

It’s all been a learning experience for me. I’m not sure what’s happening with my police case, though I’m not expecting much. I would just like to know what happened to my phone. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’m holding out for a new phone, something made harder by the fact that the screen of my 3GS recently conked out and now has no backlight! So I have to squint at it in bright daylight to see it. The price I’m paying for being careless. New stock of the 5S, please come quickly!