Mobile Phone Safety
From TheStudentWiki
Only make essential calls in the street. Using a mobile phone in a busy area advertises the fact that you have a piece of valuable property and while talking on the phone you are distracted and not aware of who might be watching you or who might be a potential thief. Use them out of public view and somewhere where you can see what it happening around you.
Many mobile phones are stolen in places like pubs and nightclubs when they are left on a bar, table or on a nearby seat. Open handbags also prove tempting for thieves, as do carried rucksacks, coats left hanging on chairs and phones left unattended in vehicles and other places.
Security mark your phone with a postcode and house number using an ultra-violet pen. The best place is underneath the battery near to the SIM card and on the back of the battery.
A mobile phone can be identified through two numbers:
- The phone number unique to the SIM card.
- The IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number which is unique to the phone handset.
Currently when police take crime reports the SIM card number is recorded only. The victim then contacts their phone network provider. The policy is then to send a blocking signal out to the SIM card rendering it useless. Criminals have picked up on this and they discard the SIM card straightaway after stealing the phone. They are then left with a handset that can be sold on in a pub or to a local dealer who then only has to buy a legitimate SIM card and the phone is once again operational with no way of detection.
However it is possible for any person to find out the IMEI number of a handset by putting the following code into the phone *#06# (star, hash, zero, six, hash). This means that if police were to record the IMEI number then we would have a chance of detecting persons using stolen handsets.
Police are now urging mobile phone users to key in the *#06# number and record their IMEI number so in the event of the phone being stolen the police have a chance of arresting a person who may subsequently use the handset. IMEI numbers will now be recorded by the police and checked against suspected stolen mobile phones.
See also:
