# Recovering Android Phones



## Soupdog50 (Sep 2, 2011)

Hey Guys
As part of the news team I'm writing a review on Prey, an app that helps you find your phone/tablet when it's lost or stolen.
If you guys have any experience with your phone being lost or stolen and then handing it's location (using any Android Tracking app) to the police I'd like to hear about it.

While I do live in a fairly scary part of Edinburgh I haven't managed to get my phone stolen and I'm too fond of it to loose it on purpose.

I'm interested in hearing about whether the police in different areas will act on information you provide or if you've used the app to get your phone back using insurance.

If you use Prey or any of it's numerous competitors feel free to say why.

Please mention if it's not ok for me to quote you for the article and say where you are.

Also if you have any apps you'd like us to review you can send me a PM or leave a note in this thread.

Thanks for your help.


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## super3devo (Oct 8, 2011)

My wife had her mez stolen out of her car at work. The bad part was we had never installed any sort of app to track it before hand. We used market on my evo3d browser to download a couple tracking apps that pushed to the phone silently. The three or so we tried worked somewhat and we managed to get the phone to reply to a text of "location" and it spit out several GPS locations showing the device moving. We waited to see if one of the GPS pings would come back as a house we could pinpoint on the map. After a bit the texts stopped coming and we were left in the dark for hours. Since I screwed up the recovery at a previous point, thus rendering the ability to wipe or factory reset null and void. I was confident the thief found the app and uninstalled it. We tried a few more apps but by that evening I had started to kinda give up.

Come 5:20 am when I'm sound asleep my phone starts going off. GPS location is xxx.xxx then GPS location is xxx.xxi the another and another and on and on. Guess they didn't find the app after all. We had sent a bunch of texts telling the phone to report location. It must have been off or on airplane mode ect, cause all one after another we started to get hit after hit all within the walls of the same residence. So come 5:25 I'm burning rubber out of the driveway ready to go kick a door down. Well low and behold, abandoned flop house. 
Neighbors explained it has been empty 4 months but that the son of the owners still came by at night to get high. Got the guys name and headed home to do some searching for a new address for the dude. My wife works at a plasma donation facility that pays donors on a debit card. She recognised the name of the dude who squats at the house as someone that donates twice a week. Who just so happened to finish his donation about 10 mins prior to the car being broke into. So we checked the calls on the phone and twenty minutes after the theft there were three 4 minute calls to the same number one after another. The number was the one you can call to check your cards balance after a donation. Why three ? Well they had one card of their own plus my card and my wife's card also stolen along with the phone her purse a pack of smokes and a half a rockstar energy drink.

So I add it all up, phones GPS hits all over the whole floor plan of this house. The house were the same known individual was at smoking meth. The same individual who was at the scene of the theft at the time of the theft, verified by his donation records. Add the fact two debit cards were stolen and called for balance checks, and the third call tells me its most likely a donor checking there card and the two stolen ones one after another. The fact this guys name keeps coming twenty miles apart, both at just the right time tells me I need to go find him. 
Knowing I would hurt the guy, I did the right thing. I called the detective we spoke with to report the theft originally. He came by the house and we sat down and I lined up all that I had discovered and filled him in. He seemed impressed by it all and promised to go look into it. That was 5 months ago. The police never bothered to contact us again. Taxes well spent i guess. We never did recover the phone but I did realize the importance of having the apps in place ahead of time. Our phones are now all rocking android lost a free app that allows you to use the Google account on the phone to control the phone. You can control almost every function of the phone, turn on GPS remotely access the cameras and microphones. Lock the screen, wipe the SD card or as a last resort full factory reset . The one thing I did extra that I strongly suggest is to use root explorer or adb to move the installed apk from data/app to system/app. That along with the app having system admin privileges makes me 10 times more confident that the average thief/druggie would not have an easy go at stopping the app from working. Its the app I would recommend to anyone who's interested in something like this. Just take the extra step to push it to system and you should be all good.

That's enough of the one finger tapatapa for now. Peace out.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk


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## Soupdog50 (Sep 2, 2011)

Thanks, that's a great help. Sorry for the slow reply the loss of the forum app cost me dearly.
Shame after all the effort the police didn't even bother to look into it.


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## ImaComputa (Sep 8, 2011)

I haven't had mine lost yet but +1 for android lost. I have it on my phone just in case and it does everything for free and with no battery loss.


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## Soupdog50 (Sep 2, 2011)

Cool, the article will be up soon.


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