Finding my iPhone - Conned through SMS and website

Question

I lost my iPhone 6 phone on Tuesday night at a club. I was registered on iCloud.com so on next morning I saw the phone was offline and showed the last known location. However the 24 hours rule meant thereafter the phone did not show the last location. I had the phone lock and had given another number for the user to call me thinking if sold someone will see the message. The thief was very clever and sent an SMS that came as an INFO SMS stating my phone is tracked in the city and login with a URL www.findmyiphone.usrs0.com/
I not thinking immediately clicked and tried to login, the website that opened on my spare phone browser was similar looking with the same color like the icloud.com website. Only later did I realized it was a fake site and the purposes was for me to enter the Apple ID and password and then when I logged in I found my phone was deleted from my original iCloud.

My question is, how to track this person from the website and SMS received?

Answer 1

Indeed an unfortunate situation for you and I'm going to save myself the teacher's voice, I guess you learned phishing the hard way.

The next step greatly depends on the authorities you lost the phone in. First, go to the next police station and report your phone stolen. Tell them the story with as much details as possible (e.g. when did you loose it, when did you last locate the phone, where was the phone last located). Take the phone with the info SMS to the police as well (be prepared to leave it there). The message will show the time stamp that is crucial to revert the line of communication in your providers network. That actually is the last step, the authorities will have to try and identify the originating number of that SMS. With that information and with the ID of your iPhone it is possible to triangulate either of the devices. To be honest, I expect that the info SMS did not come from any mobile phone, but was sent from a web service offering a free SMS gateway. Therefore the best and probably only shot is the provider to locate the phone in the mobile network cell. However, more bad news it might be possible that your provider does not cooperate in such cases and/or that the police is overloaded with other crimes so that your theft is not urgent. The more time passes, the less likely it is for you to get your phone back. If you happen to have insurance that covers out-of-house theft, you should take the police report to the insurance company and file an insurance report.

Answer 2

I once got my phone stolen, too. It was not an iPhone and I did not use any phone-tracking app or service, so I immediately went to the police and said everything I knew about the phone, the situation, the suspect from my point of view and so on. The very important role, while the police was searching for my phone, was the phone's IMEI number. The police filed an inquiry to all the local service providers (T-Mobile, etc...) that if a call/connection will be placed by a device with the same IMEI number, they want it's approximate location, time, history of calls/sms, and so on. Maybe a week or two passed, and my phone was found. I went to the police, took my phone and went home.

Note: You have to prove that you are the real owner of the phone. Documents that prove that you bought the phone, the real phone's box with the IMEI written on it will certainly help to prove it.

This is my experience and what I did after getting my phone stolen. I hope you can at least have an idea on how it worked out for me, so you can take similar steps towards solving your situation.