Martin Lewis has told every person with an iPhone or Android smartphone to make a few simple changes – or live to regret it. Appearing on ITV show This Morning, the personal finance guru explained if people fail to get them set up properly then if it goes missing or is stolen they could be cleaned out. And he explained how everyone should type in a five digit code.
With phone thefts on the rise, Martin Lewis explained the simple checks everyone should do today to protect their device. It comes after recent calls from MPs on the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, saying tech companies are not doing enough to combat mobile phone theft.
The committee said it had pressed the companies on why they had not implemented steps to prevent stolen handsets connecting to cloud accounts in foreign countries. Phone theft has become an increasing concern in recent years, especially in London where around 80,000 handsets were stolen last year, according to the Metropolitan Police.
Many of the devices end up being shipped overseas, with the Met alleging earlier in October that one smuggling network had sent up to 40,000 stolen phones from the UK to China in the past year. Mr Lewis said people should first download a specific App.
He said: “Everybody who’s got a smartphone, if you’re Apple, if it’s find my device, if you’re Android, it’s the smart things app, then you can locate it, but also you can switch off payments. It doesn’t stop your phone being sold on, but it reduces the risk, cause let’s be really plain, two risks for your phone being nicked one, you lose it, you have to claim on your insurance and get it back, and two, they can access your information.”
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Mr Lewis said there are other settings on the phone people should use – and to make sure they apply to banking apps. He said: “Make sure your biometrics are set up, your face or fingerprint ID both on your phone. And your banking apps, that’s very important, not just on one, make sure it’s on both.”
And he explained everyone should type a 5 digit code into their phones: “Next one, everybody do this now. Type into your phone *#06#. Rachel’s making a note. That’s *#06#. You’ll get it like what looks like a series of barcodes come up, those are your IMEI numbers. Screen grab those, email them to yourself, that’s the ID you’ll need if your phone’s nicked, so that you can recognise your phone, *#06#.” You can type that code in on he dialler.
Notifications should be turned off too: “Next, really important this one, and you’ll understand why, turn off your preview notifications. So you know when you, when you pay for something and they send you the text code, yeah, that comes through. That’s fine when your phone is unlocked and you’re on it, but if you have preview notifications, it will show that code on the lock screen.
“If you turn off preview notifications, it tells you you’ve got a message but doesn’t include the code. So if someone nicks your phone and then. They can’t see that code, so turn off preview notifications, and the final one I’d say is go onto your phone, look at the security settings of your particular phone and go and have a play and see what security settings there are. None of this will stop your phone being nicked, but it reduces the risk of you being defrauded if your phone is nicked. It protects you.”
