On the Loss of a Phone

I took my daughter to Six Flags Magic Mountain today. We’ve had season passes for many years, and today was the last day that we were planning to visit for 2023. On the Twisted Colossus Ride (which includes a couple of sections where riders are upside down), her phone slipped out of her back pocket and was nowhere to be found. We were directed to Guest Relations where we were told to file a Lost & Found Report:

As described in the instructions, we were told that it is important to provide the IMEI number. I know how to retrieve the IMEI number from the settings on an iPhone, but since the phone was lost, we don’t have it. We were told to retrieve it from our carrier.

Our carrier is Visible, a low-cost plan by Verizon. Part of what enables Visible to be low-cost is that there is no option to speak to a live customer support representative—instead, all inquiries must be done via chat. To chat with a representative, you must login to your account. Well, I had not logged in to the account in quite some time, and after entering the username and password, Visible insisted that I turn on 2-factor authentication and gave me only 1 option to enable it: by sending a text message to the phone which we did not have in our possession.

As a workaround, I decided to try the Messages app on my daughter’s Mac, where she can normally send and receive text messages. I found, however, that while I was able to send and receive iMessages to her account via WiFi (which show up in blue), we could not receive the SMS text messages (which show up in green) from Visible without her phone so were unable to turn on 2-factor authentication. And therefore it seemed too difficult at the moment to contact Visible to retrieve the IMEI number.

I noticed in the Lost & Found Report form, there was a “How to find an IMEI number” tooltip which provided many options to try if you have the phone. These were nice to know but useless to me in this situation:

• Dial *#06# on device
• Navigate to Settings > General > About
• Look on the back of the device
• Look on the back of the SIM card tray

It also said that if you’ve lost the device, check the IMEI number on the product packaging. Unfortunately we bought the phone used, and Visible did not provide us with the original product packaging.

Finally, it provided an option to visit appleid.apple.com > Devices. When I logged in with my daughter’s Apple ID, my heart sank when the 2-factor authentication message said that it needed to send a text message to her phone WHICH WE DID NOT HAVE IN OUR POSSESSION. I clicked OK anyway, and thank goodness that all Apple devices that are logged in with the Apple ID are prompted to allow or disallow the login. So from her Mac, we clicked “Allow” which provided us with the 6-digit number for 2-factor authentication. From the Devices section, we were able to see the serial number and IMEI number of the phone.

Finally we were able to submit the Lost & Found Report to Magic Mountain. We received a confirmation of receipt of the report, and now we wait and see if they find it. While at Guest Relations, we were told that there is a 50% success rate for finding lost items. Fingers crossed. The moral of the story is:

DO NOT LOSE YOUR PHONE

False Alarm - Poor Location Tracking

One of the benefits of having Apple accounts (via Apple ID) linked to all of our Apple devices (our family has 2 iMacs, a MacBook Pro, an Apple TV, 2 iPads, and 2 iPhones) is that we can be notified when and where someone is using our Apple ID. Well, hopefully that someone will the the rightful owner of the account, but if not, then you are given the option to disallow the login, change your password, and even force a signout from all linked devices.

Earlier tonight, I was using my Apple TV. Shortly thereafter, I saw the following prompt on my iMac:

I live in Los Angeles, and Tustin is approximately 50 miles from where I live. What would you have done? I thought that since I had just recently used my Apple TV, it could have been me (although I was not prompted to sign in to my Apple TV). However, it felt to me that location tracking via wifi should be accurate enough to at least pinpoint location to the correct city, and 50 miles seemed like too much of a margin of error to grant to location tracking. So to err on the side of caution, I clicked the "Don't Allow" button, changed my password, and forced all devices to sign out of my Apple ID.

When using my iPhone, I was asked to re-enter my Apple ID password since I had unceremoniously booted myself out moments before. Upon signing in, I received the same message on my iMac that my Apple ID was being used to sign in to a device near Tustin (I was still at home in Los Angeles). So on the bright side, I am pretty sure that my Apple ID had not been compromised. But on the other hand, come on Apple (I know you read my blog but won't admit it), you can do better with your location tracking–can you at least locate the device to the correct city? That would be nice, thank you.