Last night I lost my ATT cell phone. Left it in a cab in NYC. I want to give it some time to turn up. It was turned off, so subscribing to Familymap won’t help. I immediately had internation calling blocked. The phone is not capable of connecting to the internet. Is there anyway someone can run up large bills on this phone. Should I suspend it now, or wait awhile and see if it turns up? I am not worried about loosing a few hundred regular minutes, I have a ton of rollover minutes saved.
Suspend it. Now. Maybe someone will find it, turn it on and start calling your contacts in hopes of finding you to return the phone. Or maybe someone will find and think, “Hey, a free phone…I wonder if it works,” and when it does they will pass it around to all their friends and the next thing you know those rollover minutes are lost. When the next bill shows up you owe a shitload of money so you call AT&T and tell them that your phone was lost a few weeks ago and you shouldn’t be responsible for the charges. They say, “A few weeks ago? Why didn’t you call us?” And you’ll be out of luck.
When you suspend the phone they SHOULD be able to help you get a new one. I say SHOULD because it’s AT&T and I’ve heard horror stories about their customer service. Your number will stay the same–they’ll just swap out the ESNs so the old phone won’t work.
Any chance you’re carrying insurance on it? If so, turn in a claim. You’ll be sent another phone within a couple of business days programmed to the same number. They will assist you in suspending service for the lost phone as well.
Your contact list will be lost, but you won’t lose anymore minutes than you already have and no one will be calling Timbucktu on your dime.
I have about 20 cell phones I have found over the years. The thing all of them worked but you couldn’t dial any number. I don’t have a cell phone so I’m not sure how to really work one, (Yes I’m one of the three Americans who has never used one), but I can get a dial tone, but if you try to dial anything it says, “This phone has been suspended.”
Then by the next day the battery is dead so I throw it in a box. I have no idea how to even go about returning one I find. Part of the problem is I live in a Spanish neighborhood so I would say almost all of the phones I find are in Spanish so I have to play with them to try to get the menu to English, then the phone battery dies
If you know the cell service provider (not the brand of phone) take it to one of their stores (not a reseller of their service) and they can track down the owner.
I keep my wife listed in my phone as “wife” in English, Czech and Arabic (which covers most places I will be with my phone). I’ve never lost it, but hopefully someone would pick that number before other random names.
Cancel it pronto!
The problem is, the more you think about it, the more bad things you can come up with that could happen :(.
The one that always bothers me is that some scary bad man might go sifting through my contacts, looking at the carefully selected photos assigned to each one, picking out folks that tickle his fancy, and then stalking them with the info from the phone. (and canceling just won’t solve this particular problem).
Ugh!
Anyway, a couple of months ago someone posted here about losing their phone so I wrote this article about lost cell phones. Check it out—there are lots of different things to consider.