How Dropbox helped get a stolen phone back (detective)
A small detective story about how, with the help of Dropbox, in four months, it was possible to return a stolen (or maybe lost) smartphone.
1. In the supermarket, the wife discovers the loss of a smartphone (HTC Desire SV) ten minutes after the last call made.
2. Attempts to call both phone numbers (dvuhsimochnogo) do not bring success - the phone outside the zone.
3. Search in stores on our route also does not bring success.
4. We call the police (only at the insistence of my wife, I would not tear people who would not look for a phone anyway).
5. After 15 minutes, the guys come with machine guns, the wife and child go home, and I go to the station and spend the next two hours writing a protocol.
6. After returning home, I change the password of my wife's Google account so that the new owners of the phone do not bother to read her mail.
7. I give my wife my old smartphone and on a sim I close the topic for myself.
My wife says, “You know, we had some strange pictures in Dropbox — a bunch of strangers. You did not photograph anyone? "
By the way, both on her and on my smartphones for Dropbox one account is used, and all photos from our smartphones are synchronized to the cloud. When the phone connects to wifi.
')
It turned out that several hundreds of photos and videos appeared in Dropbox.
After reviewing a bunch of photos and videos, I come to the conclusion that the pictures were taken not at all with my phone, but with some kind of Nokia, and for two years.
I understand that my phone connected to wifi and uploaded all the photos from the microsd card into Dropbox, which they inserted into it, probably getting it from another phone.
I study new photos and videos.
From the photos I get acquainted with the family of the happy owner of a new phone - a small child (the name and age are written on the birthday cake - 1 year, the time stamp in the photo), grandmother and grandfather - obviously live in the village, photos against the fallen Lenin monument (Kiev, December 2013) and (about a miracle!) Photos on the background of the very supermarket in which the phone disappeared, and in the courtyards near it.
A dozen phone calls (starting at 102) and half an hour, and, behold, I have the contacts of an investigator who searches for my office.
At the meeting, the investigator explains to me the difficulties of working under the conditions of the new Criminal Procedure Code (according to which most of the investigative actions in Ukraine, allegedly require the judge’s sanction), talks about his workload and that from the beginning of the year (it was in December) they found only two or three phones and in general, for IMEI, they are looking for phones only in cases of particularly serious crimes, etc. "Well, you leave the photos, I'll take a look."
I understand that my phone is not interesting to him.
Having read the article on Habré ( “How I searched for my phone using Android Device Manager” ), I try to locate the phone via Android device manager. I see that the phone was used a few weeks ago, the location is unknown.
New photos in Dropbox do not appear, instead of them comes a letter from the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the case of the loss of my phone is closed. Periodically I check in the Android device manager whether the phone does not appear. Does not appear.
New photos have appeared again. On some in the courtyard of a rural house a car is visible and its rooms are visible.
I go to the Android device manager and see that the phone is located a hundred meters from the very supermarket where it was stolen - Google pointed to the house with just one entrance.
I take a screenshot of the map with the marked home, print several photos of the family of phone users, a photo with the car number, take the phone box, a letter from the Ministry of Internal Affairs about closing the case and go to the district officer.
It turned out that not everything is simple here either.
The precinct talks about the difficulties of working in the new Criminal Procedure Code (I’m already in the know), that he would have gone and picked up the phone before, and now he has to go to the investigator for the sanction, etc., in the end promises to break through number of cars on the base and think about what can be done.
A couple of days later, the district policeman calls me back and offers to go by the phone.
As it turned out, the car from the photos was registered at the address that the Android device manager showed on the map, the district officer called the new users of the phone and they brought him the device.
This is a happy ending that most likely would not have happened if Dropbox had not been installed on the phone, if new users had changed the account, made a hard reset, or if we hadn’t called the police after the phone was lost, etc.
I suppose that many "teapots" who get stolen / lost phones do not know about the measures to "mark the trail", therefore, having lost their phone, it is quite possible, in time, to get it back.
In history, it is somewhat surprising that, despite the change of the Google Account password, Google continued to monitor the location of the phone.
And yet, a few days before the phone returned, all contacts were lost in the google account of the wife (although she did not delete them). Is it possible that the contacts have been deleted from the phone?
Chronology
1. In the supermarket, the wife discovers the loss of a smartphone (HTC Desire SV) ten minutes after the last call made.
2. Attempts to call both phone numbers (dvuhsimochnogo) do not bring success - the phone outside the zone.
3. Search in stores on our route also does not bring success.
4. We call the police (only at the insistence of my wife, I would not tear people who would not look for a phone anyway).
5. After 15 minutes, the guys come with machine guns, the wife and child go home, and I go to the station and spend the next two hours writing a protocol.
6. After returning home, I change the password of my wife's Google account so that the new owners of the phone do not bother to read her mail.
7. I give my wife my old smartphone and on a sim I close the topic for myself.
Two months later
My wife says, “You know, we had some strange pictures in Dropbox — a bunch of strangers. You did not photograph anyone? "
By the way, both on her and on my smartphones for Dropbox one account is used, and all photos from our smartphones are synchronized to the cloud. When the phone connects to wifi.
')
It turned out that several hundreds of photos and videos appeared in Dropbox.
After reviewing a bunch of photos and videos, I come to the conclusion that the pictures were taken not at all with my phone, but with some kind of Nokia, and for two years.
I understand that my phone connected to wifi and uploaded all the photos from the microsd card into Dropbox, which they inserted into it, probably getting it from another phone.
I study new photos and videos.
From the photos I get acquainted with the family of the happy owner of a new phone - a small child (the name and age are written on the birthday cake - 1 year, the time stamp in the photo), grandmother and grandfather - obviously live in the village, photos against the fallen Lenin monument (Kiev, December 2013) and (about a miracle!) Photos on the background of the very supermarket in which the phone disappeared, and in the courtyards near it.
A dozen phone calls (starting at 102) and half an hour, and, behold, I have the contacts of an investigator who searches for my office.
At the meeting, the investigator explains to me the difficulties of working under the conditions of the new Criminal Procedure Code (according to which most of the investigative actions in Ukraine, allegedly require the judge’s sanction), talks about his workload and that from the beginning of the year (it was in December) they found only two or three phones and in general, for IMEI, they are looking for phones only in cases of particularly serious crimes, etc. "Well, you leave the photos, I'll take a look."
I understand that my phone is not interesting to him.
Having read the article on Habré ( “How I searched for my phone using Android Device Manager” ), I try to locate the phone via Android device manager. I see that the phone was used a few weeks ago, the location is unknown.
Another month has passed
New photos in Dropbox do not appear, instead of them comes a letter from the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the case of the loss of my phone is closed. Periodically I check in the Android device manager whether the phone does not appear. Does not appear.
... and another month
New photos have appeared again. On some in the courtyard of a rural house a car is visible and its rooms are visible.
I go to the Android device manager and see that the phone is located a hundred meters from the very supermarket where it was stolen - Google pointed to the house with just one entrance.
I take a screenshot of the map with the marked home, print several photos of the family of phone users, a photo with the car number, take the phone box, a letter from the Ministry of Internal Affairs about closing the case and go to the district officer.
It turned out that not everything is simple here either.
The precinct talks about the difficulties of working in the new Criminal Procedure Code (I’m already in the know), that he would have gone and picked up the phone before, and now he has to go to the investigator for the sanction, etc., in the end promises to break through number of cars on the base and think about what can be done.
A couple of days later, the district policeman calls me back and offers to go by the phone.
As it turned out, the car from the photos was registered at the address that the Android device manager showed on the map, the district officer called the new users of the phone and they brought him the device.
This is a happy ending that most likely would not have happened if Dropbox had not been installed on the phone, if new users had changed the account, made a hard reset, or if we hadn’t called the police after the phone was lost, etc.
I suppose that many "teapots" who get stolen / lost phones do not know about the measures to "mark the trail", therefore, having lost their phone, it is quite possible, in time, to get it back.
In history, it is somewhat surprising that, despite the change of the Google Account password, Google continued to monitor the location of the phone.
And yet, a few days before the phone returned, all contacts were lost in the google account of the wife (although she did not delete them). Is it possible that the contacts have been deleted from the phone?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/213419/
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