Today on my mornign walk I found a cell phone lyingin the mud on the side of the road. It was switched on and working, so I don’t think its been there long.
I’d like to return it to its owner, but there’s nothing to indicate who that would be. I turned it off when i found it, and when I turned it back on it had gone into PID protect mode, so I can’t go through the saved numbers to try and find the owner.
Any suggestions? Or should I just toss it?
I’ve seen in some other thread the suggestion to donate old cell phones to women’s shelters, as they would still be able to be used to make 911 calls. Worth a try.
Leave it on. The guy who lost it may try to call.
Haj
Most cell phones will briefly display the telephone number when turned on. Call this number from another phone and leave a message for the owner that you have his phone,. If he has any interest in his messages (most people would) you should be able to reach him that way.
You could just turn it in at your local police station.
Can you tell who the carrier is? If it’s a Sprint phone, you can take it into Sprint and they can track down the owner…in fact I bet that most cell carriers could figure out what carrier the phone belonged to, if you can’t tell just by looking.
If it has gone in a Protection Mode the owner has probably called his carrier and reported in stolen. I would leave it on when you you have a few hours and I would think that the carrier will register that the phone is on and will call. Good luck!
Y’see, with this situation my imagination would be running away with me. I’d be like “oh, what if a person got kidnapped and left this cell phone as a clue that he’d been kidnapped and needed help, etc”
But i’m freaky that way.
Each phone (at least with some brands) has a chip in it that contains owner subscription information, including telephone number. This chip can be transferred from phone to phone. All you have to do is take or mail the phone to a distributor for the brand and they should be able to track the owner for you.
My nephew had gotten a boatload of phones from various companies as “promotional consideration” and among them was a top-of-the-line Nextel phone. My brother had a plain vanilla Nextel and all they did was switch my brother’s “chip” into the new phone and he was good to go. So, the important stuff isn’t in the phone, it’s in a removable chip.
Cillasi, that is only true in the case of Motorola iDEN phones (Nextel only), GSM phones (those used by T-Mobile, some of AT&T/Cingular, and most of the world except the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea), and the newest GAIT phones (almost no one). The information you refer to is stored on the SIM, which is easily transferred to a new phone.
In any case, my recommendation for the phone would be to take it to the provider’s store. The provider should be able to track down the owner with no problem. If you can’t figure out the provider, post the phone make and model, and I can probably find out which providers use that model.