How To Locate A Lost Or Stolen Android Phone

Before you read this guide you need to know the “Google Account” username and password that you used to setup the phone.

Note –  If you have notifications enabled on your phone, a pop up will be displayed to say the phone is been located etc, this could indicate to whoever has the phone that you are trying to locate it, unfortunatly there is no way around this without having the phone.  This can be turned off but the average user would leave this enabled.

We suggest you try this before reporting the phone as lost or stolen to your mobile operator as thay may block the phone and you may not be able to locate it, the following guide will take the average user only a few minutes to complete.

1. Go to www.google.co.uk and click “Sign In” top right

 

2. Enter your e-mail address and password to sign in, once you are signed in sucessfully click the icon top right, and then select “Google Account”

3. Once you are signed in, the main Google account page will load.  From here you can select “Find Your Phone”

4. Once the “Find Your Phone” page loads you have various options.  If you have more than one device associated to the account they will show here.  Select the device you want to locate.

5. This will now load a screen with various options.  If you suspect the phone is somewhere in your house for example you can use the “Ring” option to make the phone ring.  If you suspect the phone is lost or stolen you need to use the “Locate” option.

6. The “Locate” option will load a map showing where the phone was last seen, and how it was connected (eg network or WiFi – if on WiFi it will show the WiFi name). There is also various option you can do at this point such as erasing the device, sign out of the phone, lock phone etc.

Additional Tracking Options

Once you are signed into the Google account visit https://www.google.com/maps/timeline this will show the current location plus an additional timeline map of loaction history (if this is enabled) you can search by date or current day, by pressing “Today”.

This Did Not Work

There could be a number of reasons why this would not work, the most common ones are listed below :-

• The battery is flat, Google can only locate the phone if it is powered on, if not it will show the last known location.
• The SIM card may have been removed, in order to locate the phone it needs an active signal.
• The phone may have been wiped by who ever now has it.
• It may have been blocked by the network if you have already reported it as lost or stolen.