Your phone is lost or stolen
A calm checklist for the first hour after losing your phone, and how to protect your photos and accounts on iPhone and Android.
Your pocket is empty. You check the other pocket, the bag, the table behind you. Take a breath. A locked phone is much harder to get into than most people fear, and nearly everything that matters can be done from another device in the next few minutes. Borrow a friend's phone or find a computer.
The first ten minutes
- Look for it. On iPhone, use Find My at icloud.com/find or another Apple device. On Android, use Google Find My Device at android.com/find. Samsung phones can also use Samsung Find.
- Mark it as lost. This locks the phone and can show a contact number on its screen, in case an honest person picks it up.
- If the map shows it somewhere unsafe, do not go after it. Contact the police instead.
The next hour
- Change your Apple Account or Google account password, then email and banking. Remove the lost phone from your account's device list once you have given up on it.
- Call your carrier and ask them to suspend the SIM, so nobody can receive your security codes by text.
- Report it to the police if you will need a report for insurance.
Over the next few days
Decide when to erase it remotely. Erasing protects the data but usually ends tracking, so many people wait until recovery looks unlikely. Then set up your replacement from your backup. Our guide on moving to a new phone covers restoring private photos and vaults.
If you kept a VaultWell vault, it can come back only from an encrypted .vwbackup file you exported earlier, restored by tracing the vault's path. There is no cloud copy, and we cannot recover a vault or its recovery phrase for anyone.
If you are reading this before anything has happened
Turn on Find My or Find My Device, use a strong passcode, and keep regular backups. On iPhone, Stolen Device Protection adds extra checks when the phone is away from familiar places. Android has theft protection features too; search Settings for "theft", since names vary by manufacturer.
One honest limit: if someone watched you type your passcode before taking the phone, they may be able to open it. That is why changing account passwords quickly matters most.