Plays pivotal role in recovering lost phones:

Losing your mobile phone, no joke

By Kurulu Kariyakarawana

Until last week I did not realise how disastrous it was to lose a mobile phone. Not merely being a handy portable instrument that you can make calls with but the smartphones that exists today acts like your personal assistant, handling almost everything. Losing this 'personal assistant' that you have relied on, with personal details, sensitive security data as well as pictorial proof of fond memories could be nothing short of heartbreak.

TRC Deputy Director Compliance Menaka H Pathirana

Well, unfortunately, I lost my 'personal assistant' last week which made me go berserk,and how detached I felt from the rest of world without my contacts, especially me being a newsman.

However, fate was on my side, as I had to sit and think for a while what I should do next. Not to mention that I was clueless as to how to act when I lost it.

As seen and heard through the media before and some promising advices received from friends, I decided to call my mobile service provider and block my number. So whoever finds it and with malicious intent would not be able to make any lengthy calls and fatten my bill or use it for some unlawful activity that would eventually put me in trouble.

Secondly, after a patient wait for several days in the vain hope of somebody picking it up, my desperate calls to my phone (the phone was mysteriously switched on and off from time to time) I decided to lodge a complaint with the nearest police station.

I explained to the police constable who recorded my entry of how I thought I would have lost my phone on the train.

The officer advised me to report the loss to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka or popularly known as the TRC.

With the copy of my police entry I met the duty officer in charge of accepting public complaints of the lost phones at the TRC Nimala Kantha who explained what the future status of my lost phone will be.

I had to fill and submit an application form stating my personal details and the details of the phone including the number and the IMEI number.

He told me how the ‘famous IMEI number’ or the acronym for International Mobile Station Equipment Identity will be then sent to all the mobile service providers in the country to blacklist that IMEI number in their systems. If somebody tries to use the lost or stolen phone with a brand new SIM card purchased from any of the alerted mobile service providers or operators, it will be indicated in their system.

In other words, as soon as somebody sends a simple text message or makes a call from the lost phone through the newly inserted SIM card, an alert will be made in the system of the particular mobile service provider that the previously blacklisted IMEI number of the lost or stolen phone has been reactivated.

And once any service provider gets such an alert on their system about a lost phone, the former will immediately inform the TRC about this.

With this information in hand, I was given a receipt by the officer with a set of guidelines to be followed next, whether the phone is found or not. Seeing the queue of complainants outside his office and the tall pile of lost phone application forms on his desk I could not help but ask him whether they were collected throughout the past couple of weeks but to my utter suprise he replied that those had been collected since morning.

With this revelation I decided to have a word with his superior TRC Deputy Director Compliance (Consumer Complaints and Consumer/Public Awareness) Menaka H Pathirana to get some insight into the situation.

According to Pathirana, the TRC receives a staggering 100 complainants related to lost phones per day. Since the inception of this service about five years ago to assist the public to recover lost or stolen phones, the unit had received close upon 90, 000 complaints to date, which is a high figure.

Would you believe it that the demand is such that the staff of this unit is doing its level best to receive these complaints everyday and to coordinate with mobile service providers and the police to recover the phones.

This is not an easy task when there are 23.5 million phone lines being operated in a country where the population is only 21 million. Currently there are 3.5 fixed landline connections registered with the TRC and and the rest of the 20 million connections are mobile phone subscribers.

This necessarily does not mean that there are 20 million phones being handled in the country but maybe there are several SIM cards being registered under the same person.

International code for IMEI check	The menu of the 132 service (#132#)	Ownership confirmation details	The connections under one's ID Pix: Thilak Perera

Explaining more about the phone recovering service, Ms. Pathirana said that once the mobile service providers detect a reported phone being switched on with a new SIM card in their system, they immediately notify the TRC with an email containing confidential details of the person who is using a new SIM card is being used to operate the lost phone.

The name, the National Identity Card number and the address of the new user will be sent to the TRC in this confidential email.

Once the TRC received this email they will pass it on to the respective police station where the complainant had lodged an entry about his or her lost phone. Simultaneously the TRC will notify the complainant that his or her mobile phone has been traced and the respective details had been forwarded to the police station.

At this point the complainant must go to the police station and take the matter up with the police by producing the reference previously given by the police for when the entry was lodged and producing the receipt issued by the TRC.

From this point the the role of the TRC to assist the public to recover a phone terminates and the rest is solely on the will and commitment of the police. Once the police receives this confidential email and in the presence of the complainant will call up the new number.

If the third party answers, the police would notify them that the phone they are using is a lost or a stolen one and that it should be handed over to the police immediately. The new owner will be summoned to the police station to record a statement and to hand over the phone.

In most cases reported in Sri Lanka the person who finds a lost phone or somebody who maliciously steals a phone will sell it to another unsuspecting party at low price not revealing its status.

The third party might be eager to purchase a good mobie phone at a low price and obviously grab this once-in-a- lifetime chance but will be in deep trouble if the authorities trace it and when it has to be returned to the real owner.

In the event the second owner refuses to hand it over to the police, a lawsuit will be filled against him.according to the police, so far many second owners reluctantly hands over the phone bearing the loss of the phone as well as the amount he paid for it.

But in reality none of this will happen as assisting to find a lost phone is not the duty of the police. Most lost phones which have been successfully recovered by the TRC, will hardly be found by the police if not for the able assistance afforded by the TRC.

According to Ms. Pathirana in relation to the high number of complaints received regarding lost phones, the ratio of recovered phones are also high, which is a positive aspect. And the cooperation received by the five mobile phone service providers including Dialog GSM, SLT Mobitel, Etisalat, Hutchison (Hutch) and Bharti Airtel was appreciative.

However, once the details of the recovered phone is passed on to the police. The duty of the TRC terminates as the latter will not have anything to do with law enforcement and try to solve disputes between the two parties.

However, the important thing that should be kept in mind is that the mobile phone is an object that can be lost at anytime. She said that some people who at one moment will clutch the phone as if it were some valuable object will at the next moment carelessly leave it around.

And once they come to complain the first remark they make is, “it is not the phone that I am worried about but the data and the pictures stored in it”. Most of the lost phones were in the price range of only Rs.5, 000 to Rs.10, 000. There is hardly a complaint regarding the loss of an an expensive smartphone worth over Rs.50, 000.

The effort and commitment put by the staff of the TRC to revover these lost phones is immense.

The complaints unit of the TRC was not set up with the intention of helping to trace lost phones but to listen and accept complaints the public has to make against mobile phone service providers and fixed line service providers for technical glitches and unfavourable service promotional gimmicks.

Wasting state resources and time just to find a low priced phone merely because the owner is not concerned about the phone but only the precious data stored in it is an absolute waste of time. If that is the case a backup of the data should always be maintained is the advice given by the authorities.

The TRC instructs mobile phone users to be aware of how to use a mobile phone.

It is just a matter of time. One should note it down in a notebook so the he or she does not solely depend on the information stored in the mobile phone.

Or if it is a modern smartphone it could be plugged to a computer to create a backup of data, pictures, personal details, songs or any other entertainment material into a modern data string cloud provided free of charge by email and search engines.

Most importantly people should know what should be stored in a mobile phone and what should not. Many people store personal pictures and sometimes private images of his or her spouse or partner which could be easily accessed by a stranger once its lost.

Storing important data and details of oneself only on the mobile phone without a backup is unforgivable. Maintaining a backup is paramount.

Safety tips for mobile users

1.Never store your ultra personal details in your mobile phone
2.Never store your bank details or Personal Identification Numbers (PIN)
3.Never store your private photos
4.Never store any sensitive images of your partner or spouse
5.Always maintain a backup of your data
6.Maintain a telephone index or a small booklet to store a copy of your contacts
7.Always know and keep your IMEI number written down for any emergency
8.By simply dialling and sending *#06# on your display the IMEI number of that particular mobile phone could be retrieved.
9.By dialling #132# anyone could get the details of the owner of the particular SIM card of that phone is being registered with. This facility enables one to see whether there are more SIM connections registered to that same person. In certain instances the criminals have used the names of the innocent civilians to register CIM connections to phones used for crimes. The details give person's name, NIC number, how many SIM connections registered to the same person as well as the numbers of those separate connections.