What to do when your iPhone is stolen

by Alefa / July 8, 2012 6:11 PM EDT

Thieves' predilection for iPhones is reaching extreme levels worldwide. Last week, a thief robbed students at Columbia University , not intending to steal personal belongings or credit cards, but specifically an iPhone. He refused to take either a Motorola Droid or a Blackberry, both of which were within easy reach; only the iPhone.

Here are the tricks we should use to secure our personal data in case a thief tries to steal our iPhone, but which will also help us locate it, among other fun actions to make things a little more difficult for any thief, no matter how skilled they are.
It's worth noting that you don't need to jailbreak or any kind of hacks to secure an iPhone this way.

1) Go to Settings => Phone => SIM PIN. Now activate a PIN for your SIM card. This will prevent a thief from removing your SIM card from your iPhone to try and use it to make calls from another phone, as the SIM will require a PIN.

IMPORTANT: If your iPhone is unlocked with GeveySIM or UltraSn0w, each time before restarting it, you must go to Settings > Phone > SIM PIN and disable the SIM card passcode. After the iPhone has restarted, go back to Settings > Phone > SIM PIN and re-enable the SIM card passcode.

2) -On the iPhone 3Gs, 4 and 4S, set up our "Find My iPhone" account (find my iPhone in Spanish)) and we will leave the GPS always on.

With this, from any web browser and by accessing our account in me.com Using our Apple ID username and password, we can remotely lock and unlock the iPhone, make it emit a sound so we can still hear it if it's nearby, or in an extreme case, see the thief's exact location and try to recover it ourselves if we don't have time to get to the police.In extreme cases, we can initiate the remote erase function and completely wipe our iPhone by erasing all its contents.

3) - Go to the Settings app => General => Passcode Lock => Enable Passcode, now we will write a 4-digit numeric code and that will be our key to access our iPhone.

4) - Go to the Settings app => General => Passcode Lock => Auto Lock and select "1 minute".

IMPORTANT: When you activate location and account restrictions , every time you install an app on your iPhone that needs to use the phone's GPS, or every time you need to add, change, or edit any data in one of your email accounts, you will have to go back to Settings => General => Restrictions => and deactivate the Location and Account restrictions and then reactivate them.

And since when it comes to security you can never be too careful, I'll give you two final recommendations for those who have jailbroken their iPhones and want to further increase their chances of recovering them if they're stolen. I recommend that, if possible, you install and download the following two applications from Cydia in the iPhoneate repo: iphoneame.com/repo:

iProtec: an application that allows us to set an access password for many applications that do not have this option. In my case, I use it for the Settings, email, text message, and phonebook applications , as well as other applications with very private information.

Here's the link to the post: https://iphoneate.com/iprotect-3-0-1

But what makes this app most useful is "SIM Card Lock ," which automatically locks all apps if it detects that the SIM card in your iPhone has been changed. And when a new SIM card is inserted into your iPhone, this app will silently send a text message (undetectable to the thief) to a pre-configured mobile number, so you can see which new number is now using your phone.

iCaughtU Pro: With this app, you can not only know the exact location of the person with your iPhone, but also know exactly who has it. iCaughtU Pro has a feature that, if someone enters the wrong passcode, it will take a photo with the front camera (if it's an iPhone 3GS without a front camera, it won't take a photo) and will send an email with the photo and location to a pre-configured email address.

Here is the Post Link: https://iphoneate.com/icaughtu-pro-2-0-1-1

Something extremely useful and interesting is that it also has the ability to send us the exact location of the iPhone via SMS to a mobile number that we have previously configured, so if the thief does not have access to the Internet and we cannot know their exact location via me.com , we will still know their location.

By Amandisha