You’ve Lost Your Phone, What Do You Do Now?

No one wants to lose their phone, but it does happen. Whether you’ve left it somewhere or it has clearly been taken, you need to know how to respond to this situation. In this week’s blog, we will give you some tips on what to do if your phone has gone missing.

Your phone isn’t just your phone. They contain every contact we have, all of our correspondence, your payment card information, your banking details, and about everything personal you could possibly imagine. So losing it or having it stolen is a big, big deal. First, you should try to find your phone.

Find Your Phone

If you think that maybe your lost device isn’t the result of theft, you can first retrace your steps and have someone try to call it. Most cell providers can help if you are one of the people who keep your phone on silent and play a loud noise to help you locate it. If this helps you find it, great; if not, it’s time to take it up a level. Both Apple and Android offer a location program that can track lost or stolen phones. You’ll need to set up this feature prior to having your phone go missing, but since there is a good chance that you paid over $1,000 for a new flagship smartphone, it should be one of your first actions when you get the phone home. 

Hopefully, after using the find my phone feature, you will find that you left it someplace and can simply go retrieve it. If that’s not the case, you need to take immediate action to keep your life from being upended completely. Here are some things you should do if you find that you aren’t going to be able to retrieve your phone. 

Cancel Your Service for that Particular Device

The first thing you are going to want to do is call your service provider from another phone and tell them the situation. They will work to shut down service to the phone. They will also help you deal with the situation as you will need to get a replacement phone.

Deactivate Your Personal Accounts

You will need to work fast to deactivate your mobile accounts. You can choose to do this individually, or you can use the service on your phone to wipe everything from the device. This is the best-case scenario when your phone goes missing because it removes the possibility of someone gaining access to the accounts on your phone and making your life that much worse. Most mobile platforms back up your data to the cloud, so you won’t actually lose everything, but it keeps that information from being stolen. 

Change Your Passwords

Obviously, this is a time-consuming task, but you will want to go through and change all of your passwords to ensure that there is no unauthorized access to your accounts. While you should be changing your passwords every so often anyway, being forced to is a big deal and will take a lot of time and effort. 

Report It to Authorities

If you suspect that someone has made off with your smartphone, you will want to file a police report, even if you don’t think the police will do much about it. The more information authorities have regarding any crime that has been carried out, the better they will be about prevention in the future. Additionally, if you happen to have insurance that covers your device, many providers will require a police report to be filed. 

Report the Lost Device to IT

If you use the device for work, you have to immediately report the device lost or stolen if it is. Your IT department will then work to shut down access to work-related devices and can actually go so far as to wipe your phone if it hasn’t already been completed. 

Get a New Phone and Move On

It may be a traumatizing experience to lose your device since you, like many other people, depend so heavily on it, but the best thing is to ensure that you take care of a lost or stolen device and then move into a new phone as soon as possible. 

It’s going to take some work, but you will be back to normal in no time. Check back to our blog regularly for useful technology information that can help you manage the technology you use day after day.