May be overthinking it a bit, the typical opportunistic thief that would try to snatch a phone and run is just looking to see what bank apps you have installed. Usually they are looking to see if you have something like Venmo installed so they can go into your app and send themselves your money. Venmo of course will say that money was transferred from your phone so it was clearly you and there’s nothing to dispute, hence you’re fucked.
These type of thieves already know to try to keep the screen unlocked long enough to do that, afterwards they usually just toss the phone somewhere. The phone hardware itself isn’t that useful while it’s still locked down and tied to someone’s Google/Apple account, most phones are firmware locked in that fashion. Sure they could wait it out until you finally remove the phone from your Google/Apple account but every time they check it’ll keep giving out their location, not really worth it.
Nowadays current Android phones do have theft protection to prevent loss in a snatch attempt e.g. my Android has settings to auto lock it if it detects fast movement while unlocked, and it also auto locks if the entire phone itself has been set offline/airplane mode for a while.
Imei Blacklisting makes them not very valuable anyways. Data worth a lot more.
Btw someone got a fradulent copy of my mother’s ID somehow. Like not a “fake id”, an actual real government issued ID, but fraudulently obtained mailed to some random address. They started trying to access money in banks, then tried sim swapping [edit: The sim swapping actually worked. Calls from my mother’s phone stopped working and other lines in the same family plan got a notification, so my parents went to the phone company and removed my mother’s name from the account and replaced the sim. As for the bank accounts, they closed and reopened the accounts with new account numbers and they had a note in there to double check the picture (which is still of my mother’s) and address on there (which the fradulent ID had a different address). They never managed to take any money. But it wasted a lot of time.]
So like, its a thing that happens. People think “identity theft won’t happen to me, I’m not important enough”, then someone steals your identity. These things never gets investigated. They said “we’ll investigate” but like a year later, not a word from those “investigators”.Only if you steal from the rich do any investigation gets done. They don’t care about the average person.
TLDR: Protect your data. Identity theft is actually common.
Is this a thing, like are most thiefs not interested in selling the hardware?
To answer the question: Id be pretty fckd i guess. Passwords are gated behind a password manager but my E-Mail would be exposed.
May be overthinking it a bit, the typical opportunistic thief that would try to snatch a phone and run is just looking to see what bank apps you have installed. Usually they are looking to see if you have something like Venmo installed so they can go into your app and send themselves your money. Venmo of course will say that money was transferred from your phone so it was clearly you and there’s nothing to dispute, hence you’re fucked.
These type of thieves already know to try to keep the screen unlocked long enough to do that, afterwards they usually just toss the phone somewhere. The phone hardware itself isn’t that useful while it’s still locked down and tied to someone’s Google/Apple account, most phones are firmware locked in that fashion. Sure they could wait it out until you finally remove the phone from your Google/Apple account but every time they check it’ll keep giving out their location, not really worth it.
Nowadays current Android phones do have theft protection to prevent loss in a snatch attempt e.g. my Android has settings to auto lock it if it detects fast movement while unlocked, and it also auto locks if the entire phone itself has been set offline/airplane mode for a while.
Hardware is good, but why not have both?
Imei Blacklisting makes them not very valuable anyways. Data worth a lot more.
Btw someone got a fradulent copy of my mother’s ID somehow. Like not a “fake id”, an actual real government issued ID, but fraudulently obtained mailed to some random address. They started trying to access money in banks, then tried sim swapping [edit: The sim swapping actually worked. Calls from my mother’s phone stopped working and other lines in the same family plan got a notification, so my parents went to the phone company and removed my mother’s name from the account and replaced the sim. As for the bank accounts, they closed and reopened the accounts with new account numbers and they had a note in there to double check the picture (which is still of my mother’s) and address on there (which the fradulent ID had a different address). They never managed to take any money. But it wasted a lot of time.]
So like, its a thing that happens. People think “identity theft won’t happen to me, I’m not important enough”, then someone steals your identity. These things never gets investigated. They said “we’ll investigate” but like a year later, not a word from those “investigators”.Only if you steal from the rich do any investigation gets done. They don’t care about the average person.
TLDR: Protect your data. Identity theft is actually common.