People lose cell phones all the time. How many cell phones has your child lost? They get left on trains and buses. Dropped in the park or the school playground. Left down the back of their friends’ sofas. Somehow they magically disappear never to be seen again.
We’ve all done it at some time or another. We’ve been out with friends, out with colleagues, meeting clients and the phone rings. If it’s a text, we look at it quickly and then put the phone down. Then we finish what we were doing, get up and move on. We arrive home and decide to read the text(s) again. But oh dear, where’s the phone gone! You’ve lost it. Can you remember where you last used it?
I spent two years working for a charitable trust whose property was open to the public. I was constantly amazed at the amount and diversity of lost property our visitors left behind. We had a box in the office marked “lost property” and mostly, all we could do was wait and hope that someone would miss the item and phone and claim it.
With all those lost phones magically disappearing it seems likely that from time to time some will be found. If you find a lost cell phone, how can you reunite it with its owner? Contrary to what the media would want us to think, most people are honest and will want to return the phone to its rightful owner. After all, if you or I lost a phone, we’d like to think that if it was found, the finder would try to return the phone.
There’s not a lot of point in taking a found cell phone to the Police. They are far to busy to bother about such minor matters. if you are going to return the phone to its owner you need some way that you can find out who owns it.
You need to find the phone’s number. A simple way of doing this is to use it to ring your own cell phone. No need to answer. Your cell phone will then tell you the number of the lost phone. Once you know that you can go to a reverse phone lookup site to find out who the phone number belongs to.