[uujudy]

We found a cell phone in the street outside our villa. I searched through the phone & tried calling the number listed for the owner. Of course that didn't work; the owner listed his cell number as his phone number. duh. Meanwhile, I also tried sending a text. Another duh.

I felt like a snoop looking through the address book for the ICE (In Case of Emergency) contacts. They're usually a member of the family. Nope. No ICE contacts listed. I must say, I didn't know you could have that many contacts in your cell phone's address book! There were hundreds!

Then I snooped even further and looked at the photos on the phone, hoping to find some 'family' shots that would match the photos of the contacts in the address book. My eyes weren't good enough for that. Nobody looked familiar in the photo album.

Next, I looked at the call log. There was one person that the phone owner seemed to call frequently, so I took a chance and called that number. That person recognized the phone number calling, and was able to give me a land line phone number for the owner of the phone. I left a message on their voicemail, and the owner's wife called me back the next morning. They came over and picked up the phone, and were very, very grateful because it was a business phone. Most of the contacts in the phone were their customers!

So here's a tip: check your cell phones and make sure you have alternate numbers listed for yourself & you have your ICE contacts listed. Otherwise, the person who finds your phone might not be able to find YOU.
Fortunately, the phone wasn't password protected. If yours is, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

[gomoho]

Nicely done.

[BobnBev]

A great post with good information. Thank you.

[Tom Hannon]

Good work in finding the cell phones rightful owner. I found a cell phone last year inside a tunnel going to Colony. The battery was dead. Had no way of charging it. I couldn't retrieve any info. I call its carrier (Sprint) with the serial number but because of security they would not give me contact info. HELLO . Sprint didn't want to know nothing anout it. I posted on TOTV and eventually left it at a Sprint store when I returned to NY. Not sure what happened afterwards

[uujudy]

Tom, you'd think Sprint could have contacted the owner of the phone, wouldn't you? That was my next plan, if the call to the random contact didn't work. I was going to call Verizon & see if they could contact the owner of the phone. It's not the loss of the actual phone that's disturbing... It's the loss of all the contacts.

After this adventure we both made sure our own phones had alternate phone numbers listed, and that our ICE contacts were designated ICE1 and ICE2, etc... We also discovered that our 'favorites' file was filled with businesses instead of people. We fixed that immediately. It was a good lesson for us.

[batman911]

If you owned an Apple iPhone you would have all that data backed up on your Apple PC or iPad.