What To Do If You Lose Your iPhone

By Brad Burd

So you just lost or had your iPhone stolen?

Make sure to take these steps right away to make sure the situation doesn’t get worse:

Call your wireless provider to deactivate your SIM (for AT&T call 1-800-331-0500)

Even with a password on your iPhone anyone can use your SIM card in another phone and skyrocket your bill. Make sure you call your wireless provider and get this deactivated. Read Step to Secure your iPhone for more on the topic.

Locate your stolen phone’s position with Mobile Me

Hopefully by now you have read the Step to Secure your iPhone and set up a Mobile Me account.

Log into me.com

Go to “Find My iPhone” under the Account tab

Send a Lost/Stolen Message to the iPhone (that keeps on nagging)

Once logged into me.com you can send a message and sound that plays for 2 minutes – even if the phone is muted!

Just log into me.com

Select “Display a Message or Play a sound”

Let the person who has the phone know that the phone is reported lost/stolen. Have the message say to return to the nearest corporate wireless store (AT&T has a great procedure to make sure stolen/lost phones are promptly return to their rightful owner)

Hard Lock Your iPhone

Hopefully by now you read the Step to Secure your iPhone article, and hopefully the only thing between your Facebook account, texts, pictures, and other personal information isn’t a 4 digit number that’s pretty easy for someone to see you type in.

Either way I recommend you Hard Lock your phone – this locks it from your Mobile Me account, so even if someone gets your password the iPhone stays locked – unless unlocked from your Mobile Me account

1 Go to me.com

2 Go to “Remote Passcode Lock”

Still No Luck? Remotely wipe you data! Remember you have it backed up on your computer

Even with a secure password and the iPhone locked anyone can just hook your iPhone to a computer, select ‘Open Device to View files ‘ and view all your pictures, videos, and recordings.

Hopefully you’ve followed the securing you iPhone article and have made sure to make a backup of everything on your iPhone to your computer.

If you have the good news is you can wipe everything off your iPhone so no one can get ahold of your data. If you do get your iPhone back simply connect it to your computer and iTunes will restore everything back to it.

1 Log into me.com

2 Select “Remote Wipe iPhone”

This restores the iPhone to factory setting and this message will appear:

Remember if you backed everything up to your computer you can simply restore it to the iPhone once you get it back.