A good article on Snopes about IMEI numbers and their role in locking phones.

They reckon all thieves want is to make lots of phone calls before your carrier locks the phone down. This may be very true but it seems to be a bigger issue in the USA than Europe primarily because there is very little prepaid in the USA. No great joy for a thief trying to ring an expensive destination if he steals a phone with 5 euro prepaid credit.

The optimistically titled Automatic Millionaire column on Yahoo Finance gives lots of really good tips on phone security and details a case of a consumers who got hit with a $26,000 bill after the phone was stolen. Is there a case for a credit card level of service where they call you if your phone suddenly changes calling pattern? I have got the odd call from my credit card provider asking was I really in the States spending like there was no tomorrow.

Here is an unfortunate story of an AT&T customer who had to pay $450 for porn downloads after the phone was stolen. Frisky lot these phone thieves.

Paul

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Lost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.