EPTBut now, I emerge! Today marks the day that my Starcraft life merges with my daily life. Yes, I'm coming out into the world of Blogs and the General Forum
. Frankly, I don't know where else to turn, so I've turned to one of the greatest corners of the internet.Maybe you can help me. ._.
It seems as if it were just yesterday that I had my beloved phone in my hands. Sleek, sexy, powerful. I loved my Samsung Galaxy SII more than anything in the world, which I received in October 2011. Yet, I grew detached and apathetic over the months. I think someone up there, somewhere, saw that. It was time to make me realize how much I really cared about my smartphone.
April 6th, 2012. Tragedy strikes. I had been working with a group of peers (I am in high school) on a group project. You know, the typical "fun, artsy" project that English teachers so often throw at students to make them more "engaged". It was a musical, and we needed a smartphone to play all of our tracks. I was pretty lenient on people using my phone back then, so I lent it out to one of my fellow group members, who I would later find out has ADHD. You guessed it: never to be seen again. Weeks on end contacting the office to see if anything's been found, calling my cell number to see if it would pick up. Nothing, zilch, nada -- and I mean NaDa.
I felt like I had been stabbed, only that the feeling lasted for weeks on end. I gradually dealt with the loss, never to think about my phone again. I did about everything I could, cancelled the IMEI, cancelled the service, got a new SIM, replaced my phone with one from 2007 (you can tell because it slides and doesn't have a qwerty :'(). All that was left were memories and dreams.
May/June. My heart raced. Surely the person who eventually picked my phone wasn't this stupid, right? The great thing about Android is that your Google Account is still registered with the phone, and not the SIM, which had been undoubtedly changed by now. In the following months after my loss, I picked up on some suspicious activity, here and there. Someone was using my Pandora account, which was associated with my Gmail. I checked "My Profile". I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at what I saw:
"Daniel (my name), is listening to Dance Pop Radio --Rihanna, The Wanted, The Pussycat Dolls, Flo Rida"
"Daniel likes 'More than This' by One Direction (UK)"
"Daniel likes 'White Horse' by Taylor Swift"
I now knew my phone was being used. By a teenage girl, at that. Was there a chance of getting my phone back? I did everything in my nerdy/stalking power to reach that end. I looked at my Gmail history, Gmail IP history, Facebook activity, Pandora IPs (which sadly, don't exist). I found something that would seem promising at the time. I remembered that I downloaded an application called "SMS" backup, which would do just that: backup my text messages to my Gmail account.
There was only one text message that was sent after I lost my phone.
"Daniel" to 206-351-****. Title: (no subject). Body: Hi. Date: May 6th, 2012.
These two letters sent to some Seattle number would be the slip up that this One-Direction Tween girl would live to regret. Or so I hoped. I looked up and texted this number, threateningly. No response, no records, no name. That would conclude my investigations in the months of May/June. The excitement, again, would die down and other issues would take priority over this one. It seemed as if every lead was a dead end, and so, again, I had to face the fact that I would have to live with my 5 year old slider phone.
August 28th, 2012. My mom decided to hand-me-down an old smartphone, A Samsung Vibrant (the first of the Galaxy Series). I did the usual, which was a factory reset after saving all contacts and important things that my mom would eventually need. By this point, I no longer thought about the gaping hole in my heart, my lost Galaxy SII.
It was that time again, for the universe to remind me of its existence.
The first thing I did was register my Google Account with the phone. I hopped into the Market App, to bring some life back into this app-less phone of mine. I looked into my app history, to see what I had previously downloaded. Again, the results were shocking. "Pudding Camera, Angel Camera, Coloring Book, Instagram (which I had never been fond of), Doodle gram" among many others were new apps that had been downloaded with my Google Account.
Stupid, stupid girl.
This time, I dug deeper, seething for vengeance. I found that after all these months, my Google Account was still registered with my lost phone, and all the apps on the phone were visible on Google Play. By this time, I had restarted my text correspondence with the suspicious 206-351-**** number. This time, the person responded, but it was highly cryptic and unhelpful. A dead end. (Could it actually be the new number of my stolen phone? -- I'll never know).
More digging, until I found exactly what I needed. An app had been released called "Plan B", which tracks your phone after you remotely download it to your phone. It was a long shot, but I installed the app remotely to a phone that could have been thousands of miles away, off, deactivated, sold, pawned, thrown away, bricked. But it wasn't.
Minutes later, I received a flurry of emails to my Gmail. The tracker was working. Right before my eyes was an address using GPS, accurate to 20m. (I mean, WTF, 4 months is an unbelievable amount of time for my phone to disappear off the face of the planet). Amazingly enough, the phone was still lingering in the Seattle area.
Too many mistakes, thief. I now had leverage and evidence.
I corresponded with my parents for the next few hours. We decided that for safety reasons, we shouldn't go to the address, and instead turn to the police with the substantial data that we uncovered. The next morning, at the police department, I filed my report, along with the address, proof of ownership, and random Facebook / Whitepages stalking I had done the previous night. I thought I was almost there, almost finished with my unbelievable journey of reclaiming my phone, a phone that disappeared into nonexistence multiple times over the course of four months.
Hours later, heart break (this was yesterday). The police could not implicate the thief with a crime, and could not clearly identify me as "victimized". Was finders keepers really legal? Upon investigation of Washington State law, no, no it is not. Even more, the device had valuable private personal information, which amounted to a class C felony. Emailed the officer with these details, and the fact that all my private accounts were at risk. No response (it's been over a day).
So now, after all this time, I know where my phone is, found the address of the suspicious 206 number (which was uncomfortably close to the address which I tracked my phone to), and have gotten enough information to get a good picture of who this person is. Yet, I still cannot retrieve it. And in many ways, this is more heart breaking than before.
So I ask you, TL community, how should I proceed? I am not willing to let this phantom One Direction fan continue to use my Google, Pandora, have access to my name, my contacts, my address, my email. I'm so close to finishing off the investigation of my life.
