I never imagined a smartphone would be stolen.
It was not mine, but belonged to one of my students.
Teaching hot to use smartphots and tablets
Ms. C sent me a message and asked me if I was home and available. I was free so she said she would come right away. I didn't know what had happened, but I could easily guess that it was something urgent.
As soon as she arrived, she said "My smartphone was stolen from my car. I forgot to lock the car when I went to a shop, and when I came back to the car there was no smartphone. I don't know how to disconnect the phone. Will you please help?"
I knew who the provider was so we phoned and asked them to disable the SIM card and also to issue a new one. Then I called the smartphone again and this time I got a message "The phone may be switched off or somewhere out of signal".
After that, I asked Ms C "Do you know your Google account email and password?"
She gave me one, but it was for her iPad. She asked me to order a new smartphone and then left as her granddaughter was waiting for her in the car. She said they would go to the police to report the loss of her smartphone.
The next day, I tried to remember her Google account information as I had helped her to set up the stolen smartphone. I checked my address book and found the email. Then I needed the password. I sent a message to Ms. C's iPad and she checked her notebook and found the password. I tried to explain to her how to find the location of her lost smartphone with her iPad, but she asked me to do it instead of her as she was not familiar things like that.
There were a few more things that I had to do to find the location of the smartphone, but finally I found it. The most recent location where the smartphone was turned on and in an area with signal coverage, was at a restaurant not far from her house, but that had happened 18 hours earlier.
The only thing I could do next was to phone the restaurant. To my surprise, they said that there was a lost smartphone there. I contacted Ms. C and told her to go to the restaurant to check if it was her phone. She did and yes, it was!
Someone had left it in the parking lot and a customer found it. The phone was switched off so they turned the power on to try finding the owner, but it was locked so they just kept it in the restaurant thinking someone might come to ask for it.
Ms. C and her granddaughter were at the same restaurant, at about the same time as the phone was found. It means that she had never actually lost it. It was in her car the whole time until it was left in the parking lot. She said that when it first disappeared, she had used her husband's cell phone to call her smartphone and listen for it's ringtone. The cell phone kept ringing but she couldn't hear the smartphone ringtone anywhere, including inside her car. When I called it while Ms. C was at our house, I heard a message, "The phone is switched off or somewhere out of signal". She said it was fully charged and she never used silent mode. So who switched off the phone? Who was in the car this whole time?
I could guess what had happened, but Ms. C insisted that it was her fault.