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'Honey Stick' Project Tracks Fate of Lost Smartphones
wiredmikey writes with a quote from an article at Secury Week: "In order to get a look at what happens when a smartphone is lost, Symantec conducted an experiment, called the Honey Stick Project, where 50 fully-charged mobile devices were loaded with fake personal and corporate data and then dropped in publicly accessible spots in five different cities ...Tracking showed that 96-percent of the devices were accessed once found (PDF), and 70-percent of them were accessed for personal and business related applications and information. Less than half of the people who located the intentionally lost devices attempted to locate the owner. Interestingly enough, only two phones were left unaccounted for; the others were all found."
Best way to get a phone back. LOUD annoying ringtone.
Loose that sucker. Call it and call it and call it...
Eventually "come get your freeking phone it is ringing off the hook with this stupid song"...
Has worked 3 times so far :)
Well, technically, it would be larceny here in the states. In other words, "borrowing" without intent to give back to the owner.
Hypothetically speaking, because I would try to contact the owner and return it, in a real situation, but...
If I were going to steal a cell phone, the first thing I would do is pull the battery. The second thing I would do is factory reset it, either by reflashing it from a computer, or from within the phone if it's not locked. The third thing I would do is change the IMEI.
All of the above are ridiculously easy (well, pulling the battery from an iPhone isn't), and would leave me with a phone that can't be located by you, and which can't be burned by the carrier because it has a different IMEI. Sell it as "off the back of a truck" for a few hundred, and you're done. Rinse. Repeat.
And if it's a GSM phone, there's no "bringing it in to get activated". Buy a SIM. Put it in. Hey look, it's activated!
While it may be classified as stealing by law, morally it's fine.
Only if you consider stealing to be morally acceptable.
Shame morality and the law never seem to match.
They do, in this case.
If you find a valuable item which is likely someone else's lost or misplaced property, you're supposed to bring it to a lost property office or to a police station. If it remains unclaimed after some time, it becomes yours. I have done exactly this a couple of times, and in both cases the original owner claimed the property. Clearly, it had been misplaced, not discarded. In one case, the person who reclaimed a wallet which had no identifying material (no credit cards, driving license, etc.) gave a couple of pounds to me as a reward, which was delivered anonymously via the police.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire