How can you use a find my phone app to locate your phone, strategies thieves use to escape and Key steps you need to take to avoid it!
Smartphone thieves know how easy it is to get away with the crime. If you doubt it, can I ask you, what do you do when your phone is lost or stolen?
What do you do after all your frantic effort to search for the phone in the last known location you went to fails in a case of loss?
Like millions of other Nigerians that have been helpless for years now, they do nothing. Thieves know this well, that is the exact reason they will keep committing the crime, they understand that there is no way you can find them and they can always get away with the crime!
I have personally had interactions with more than 100 persons who at some point or the other got their phone misplaced or stolen, one thing is always common, certain important steps were not taken before and after the incident which made the victim vulnerable and helpless.
Let’s consider this first, there is a wrong notion that smartphone users usually have that their phones can’t be stolen especially when they have never experienced it before. Some even go as far as committing the phone into God’s hands and praying that their phones don’t get stolen! Don’t get me wrong, these are good things to do based on individual religion or beliefs.
Sadly, these are not steps that would eventually help you, anyone can be a victim of smartphone theft at any time. One of the popular Lagos pastors got his phone stolen right inside the church from his seat; some years ago, Oni of Ife and some other important dignitaries got their smartphones stolen at Abike Dabiri’s Daughter’s wedding in Ogun state. These are people with Police as their security detail, imagine the audacity to steal and get away with their phones?
If they can be a victim, you can also be a victim as well.
With this background, what is now key is to know and understand what are the things right now that you do that makes it easy for smartphone thieves to getaway. Millions of people are ignorant of the fact that there are certain steps you can take that can at least ensure you are not helpless if it happens. Be it the value of the smartphone that is important to you or information/data you have on the phone, I will be showing you what you fail to do right now that aids them getting away with the crime.
Reasons why thieves get away with your phone
- You don’t have any find my phone (tracking software) installed
For many smartphone users, they do not understand the need for having a tracking solution or a find my phone app on their phones. Hence, they are not so bothered about it until their phones are lost or stolen. Here is how it works, for you to get instant and live location updates of any phone, the phone must be able to send the information. An average smartphone you buy in the market now doesn’t come with this kind of feature, so you have to install a third-party application such as Pins Mobile Security find my phone feature on the phone before you can get the phone to tell you its location all the time. Again, if you don’t add this layer of security to your phone before the incident, then your chances of finding your phone are low.
You also may be thinking IMEI number can help you, sadly, phone tracking doesn’t work that way especially in Nigeria. IMEI is just a number to identify a smartphone, if a particular smartphone is not transmitting its location through another technology, then the IMEI is useless in this regard. - Installing tracking software that doesn’t work in Nigeria (eg google find my phone)
For many smartphone users who have in the past couldn’t recover their phone was because they installed the wrong app. Let me explain this, most foreign-based tracking apps like google find my phone depend on the internet to work. Thieves know this well, all they need to do is to turn off the phone, remove the SIM card, or at the very least place the phone on airplane mode. One such application that has failed a lot of people in Nigeria is the default google Find my phone that comes preinstalled on almost all android devices.
Besides that, people do not even set these things up after the purchase, disconnecting find my phone is even so easy, once the Gmail account that is connected to the phone is either removed or signed out, the phone cannot even send a signal back to the user. - Not taking immediate action
If your phone is stolen, time is of the essence, the quicker you respond, track and find the phone, the easier is the possibility to find the phone. From my experience, it takes between 24 to 48hours before a thief will ever decide to factory reset a phone. This is an ample window of opportunity that a lot do not even use because they do not know where to get help from. This long lag is due to the obvious fact that most people who steal smartphones on the street do not even know how they can factory reset a phone, they usually wait till they can get it to a repair technician who can now help them format the phone.
If you have a tracking solution that works in Nigeria, Pins Mobile Security App, installed on your phone, then, tracking your phone immediately should be easy for you whether there is internet access at that time.
What then should you do to avoid this from happening to you?
- Identify and Install a tracking solution on your phone; In this case, I can only recommend the Pins Mobile Security application to you because it is the only app that works here in Nigeria taking into consideration all strategies adopted by smartphone thieves to get away with the crime
- Configure and setup as required by the tracking app; follow all instructions stated in the app to ensure the app is properly installed on your phone. If you didn’t complete the setup process, this may not allow you to get all information when it matters, so it is important to carefully complete your setup
- Check your tracking account page and get familiar with it
Going through the process of where you will see the exact location and other information is important, especially in getting familiar with it. The PMS app ensures you can check the location of your phone, see the face of the thief, see all the phone numbers the thief is either calling or receiving calls from among several other recovery information. Once you set up the PMS App on your phone, your ready-to-use account page is automatically created, just the same way you log in to your email box.
Increasingly, taking a preventive step is always important especially when it comes to security. Do not wait till the incident happens before you look for help because, at that point, your chance of getting help has reduced. You can set up the Pins Mobile Security app on your phone for free now!
