April 26, 2025
If I missed any key points or got any details wrong, let me know. This post is only for iPhones, since that is what I use and know. I am not going to attempt to cover Android.
I lost my cell phone in the ocean. In the middle of my vacation. In El Salvador. Fun!
I'm guessing it's one of the least convenient times and places to lose a cell phone.
I thought I was smart by bringing a spare phone with me on the trip, something I've done for several years when I travel overseas. That spare phone definitely saved the day, but I learned several lessons and discovered a few mistakes I made that cost me time, hassle, and money.
Several of these items relate to filing an insurance claim to replace your phone. If you don't have phone insurance, then you can potentially skip these.
Things to do BEFORE you lose your phone:
1. If you have phone Insurance: Record the exact model number, specs, specific part number, serial number, and IMEI of your phone. I typically record all of this information in my personal password manager. I also recommend taking screen shots of the phone info screens and store those images as well. If you still have the original box for the phone take photos of all of the phone specs and info on the box label as well. Unfortunately, I forgot to do this for the iPhone 15 that I lost, which has made the insurance claim process a major hassle. It turns out that my cell phone provider, AT&T, and the insurance company, Asurion, have no idea which specific phone model I was using. They are completely unable to determine if my iPhone 15 was a 256GB or 128GB model. And due to this, they have denied my insurance claim for the lost phone. Even Apple was unwilling to provide me with the specific "part number" of my phone that would allow me to prove the phone storage, even though my Apple account shows me the phone serial number. Yes, this is beyond absurd. I was surprised to learn this.
2. If you have phone insurance: Verify your phone IMEI and unlock status: This web site provides a free IMEI lookup to verify general phone model (not color or storage), Find My iPhone status, lock status, and blacklist status.
2. If you have phone Insurance: Make sure your carrier shows correct phone model, storage size, and color appears on your account. Login to your cell provider and make sure all of the phone info on your account is correct. Sometimes if you buy an iPhone 15 Blue 256GB, the carrier could potentially make a mistake and show an iPhone Black 128GB on your account. If you attempt to file an insurance claim for a lost iPhone 15 Blue 256GB, the claim will be denied because the model is "incorrect".
3. If you have phone Insurance: Call the phone insurance company and verify that they have the correct phone model, part, specs, and IMEI for your phone number or account. Make sure all of this information is correct well before you lose your phone. I discovered that phone insurance is provided through a maze of servicers, brokers, carriers, and underwriters. And every one of those companies is just as disorganized and incompetent as any other company. Which means they are great at having incomplete and inaccurate data, including completely different data than your cell service provider. If the insurance company has any inaccurate information about your phone, a future insurance claim will likely be denied. This is what I encountered. The insurance company claims I had a 128GB model, so they are denying my claim for the 256GB model that I actually had.
4. If you have phone Insurance: Understand "Last usage date": After a dozen calls to AT&T and Asurion insurance, it is clear that Asurion does not have access to detailed AT&T information about phone usage. I learned that even though I was actively using my phone on a Monday, Asurion claims they show my phone was last active on the prior Friday. After escalating my request with Asurion, the escalation agent asked me "When was the last time you made a phone call on the lost phone?" I turns out my last call was on the prior Friday. So it sounds like the insurance company may only have access to phone call dates, not data usage activity or IMEI connection data. If, like me, you rarely use your cell phone to make phone calls, it may be a hassle to get a claim approved if you didn't make any phone calls for several days before you lost the phone. If you lose your phone on a Friday, but you last made a phone call on Tuesday, you may be forced to say that you lost your phone on Tuesday. Dumb.
5. Automatic phone backup to the cloud: I only use iPhones, so I can only speak about the Apple iPhone + iCloud backups. Personally, I strongly recommend using the iCloud full phone backup service. I previously would always setup new phones from scratch, without any backup, just to have a clean phone without dozens of apps I no longer use. But these days, so many apps and authentication methods are "bound" to your specific phone that it is now a very time consuming nightmare to setup a new phone from scratch, and it will result in lost data. I setup my iPhone 15 from scratch in early 2025, and I will never do that again. The iCloud backup and restore process is amazing--it isn't perfect, but I was able to restore my entire phone configuration and contents in 5 minutes while travelling in El Salvador. My iPad detected the spare iPhone 13 that I was setting up, offered to restore my phone backup, and with one tap on the iPad, my iPhone 13 was configured 5 minutes later. Remarkable. I still had to login and re-authenticate in every application, but it was less painful and much faster than setting up from scratch.
6. Verify that photos and apps are set to backup data to cloud: I think the iPhone might default to backing up photos to iCloud, but you will want to verify. Also check all of your apps to see if they need to be configured to backup to cloud. In my case, the #1 app that requires this is WhatsApp. If you do not have WhatsApp specifically configured to perform its own separate automatic backups, with its own separate 64-digit encryption key, you will lose all chat history. I previously kept the WhatsApp backup turned off until I setup WhatsApp fresh on my iPhone 15 and found that it deleted all of my chats. I now keep backups enabled in WhatsApp. However, I found that after I restored WhatsApp to a new phone, I had to manually re-enable backups in WhatsApp. So verify that important apps are configured to backup their own data.
7. Understand that some apps will lose all data: The most obvious one for me is Signal. Based on my experience, if you setup a new iPhone with Signal, you lose all chat history and all other connected devices are logged out and unlinked. This is a hassle for me. Every single time. Apparently Android supports Signal backups and restore, but not iPhone or Windows.
8. Some apps will claim to restore data, but must be completely reconfigured: The biggest offender for me is Microsoft Authenticator. It offers to "restore" your Authenticator accounts, but it only restores the list of your accounts. None of the records are functional. You have to reauthenticate and reconfigure every single Microsoft account. This is an incredibly time consuming hassle because MS Authenticator asks you to confirm the code that it is sending to...MS Authenticator. This leaves you trying to figure out how to re-authenticate all of your MS logins without having access to MS Authenticator. I found that the page aka.ms/mfasetup lets you add additional devices for use with Microsoft Authenticator, so I am going to try to setup my iPhone and iPad to both be able to authenticate all of my many, many Microsoft logins. If you don't have a backup device to get the MS Authenticator codes, it is a time consuming hassle to reconfigure them.
9. The "Find My" may not help you find a lost iPhone: After my iPhone 15 went swimming in the ocean, I was unable to get an updated location, even though the phone was probably fully functional for quite a while. For a few days it showed where I last had the phone unlocked about 30 minutes before it was lost. Now it shows a random location from the day before it was lost. I discovered to my surprise that I could not "ping" the phone or actively request an updated location from my Apple account after I lost the phone. I then asked Perplexity whether water blocks cell signal, and sure enough: Just 1 meter of water, especially salt water, will typically completely block cell signal frequencies. So if you lose your phone in water, game over, unless you have a dive team on standby.
10. Have a spare backup phone for travel: I recommend travelling with a spare phone that supports eSIM. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it absolutely needs to support eSIM. For my trip to El Salvador, I brought a spare iPhone 13 that I got on eBay for $270. One of the best purchases and decisions I made this year. The iPhone 13 supports both physical SIM and eSIM, so I was able to activate the phone with an eSIM. This allowed me to continue my vacation virtually uninterrupted. However, I was unable to activate the phone myself online--I had to call AT&T and they had to manually enter the IMEI and activate the phone on their end before I could add the eSIM to the phone. But once the AT&T rep figured out what needed to be done, it was a very simple activation process and I was able to continue my vacation with a cell phone. Make sure you have proper charging cables for the backup phone. In my case, I now use only USB-C cables for my iPhone 15, iPad, AirPods, and everything else, but my backup iPhone 13 uses Lightning, so I made sure to carry a Lightning cable with me on my vacation.
11. Have a secondary device to navigate the recovery process: I had an iPad and a laptop with me in El Salvador. That let me get to my AT&T account to try and activate my backup iPhone. I was able to use the iPad to call AT&T and setup an eSIM for my backup iPhone. You could just borrow someone's else's phone, but having my own secondary device was very handy and made the process much easier.
12. Have a VoIP service setup on your secondary device: I had to call AT&T to activate my backup iPhone 13. But because the eSIM activation was not working on the AT&T web site, I had to call AT&T. But I didn't have a phone, because it was in the ocean. Fortunately, my business phone service has a VoIP app, so I was able to call AT&T from my iPad. The main AT&T toll free number did not work in El Salvador, so I found an international customer support number that did work from El Salvador. Again, you could borrow someone's phone, but I've found that trying to use my cell phone for calls while in El Salvador is a coin toss at best, so I was much more confident using my VoIP service.
13. Have a VPN service setup on your secondary device: I discovered that Asurion, the insurance provider for AT&T, completely blocks all traffic from El Salvador. So I was unable to access their web site on my iPad. I fired up ProtonVPN, connected to the US, and I was able to access the insurance claim web site. Unfortunately, because I had activated my backup iPhone 13 with AT&T before I submitted an insurance claim, I was unable to submit the claim on the web site. I had to call them to file a claim.
14. Have TOTP Authenticators setup on your secondary device: Setup your password manager and MS Authenticator on your secondary device so that you still have MFA codes available if you lose your phone. It makes recovery much easier once you replace your phone.
Things to do AFTER you lose your phone:
1. If you have phone Insurance: Call your carrier: If I lose my phone again, my first call will be to my cell provider to confirm the steps for the "lost phone process", just to verify the process and make sure I do things in the correct order. Verify the lost phone is properly listed on your carrier account, verify the IMEI, and verify that the carrier does show that the phone was active on the carrier network on the day the phone was lost. Based on my experience, you do NOT want to activate a replacement phone yet. In my case, I activated a phone first, and now the insurance company is denying my claim, saying that my lost phone was not active on the carrier network on the day that I lost it. It's a major hassle.
2. If you have phone Insurance: Call the insurance provider: If you are filing a claim for the lost phone, as I mentioned above, I strongly recommend filing an insurance claim before activating a backup phone on your account. Asurion, the insurance provider for AT&T, allows you to file a claim online. You simply login, choose the phone that was lost from a list, provide a note, and submit the claim. If you have previously ensured that the carrier and insurance company have your correct phone model listed, it will make things much easier. I was told that claims are reviewed within 24 hours, so you should get an approval or denial email in under 24 hours. This means you are stuck without a phone for at least a day. Only after the claim is approved and a replacement phone is shipped should you attempt to activate a backup phone. In my case, my claim was first denied in 3 hours. The second claim took 14 hours before I receive yet another denial. This is the down side of cell phone insurance. Until the claim is approved and a replacement phone is shipped, you are stuck without a phone. The insurance customer service reps claimed that activating a backup phone shouldn't cause any issues with a claim, but in my case, two denials seem to indicate they are wrong. (along with my points above about verifying all info prior to losing a phone)
3. If you have phone Insurance: "Last usage date" may be the last phone call date: As I mentioned above, I was constantly using the phone until I lost it on Monday. But the insurance company shows that it was last used on the prior Friday, which makes zero sense--except that Friday happens to be the last time I made a phone call. The 2 claims I submitted listing Monday as the last usage date were denied because Asurion claims the phone "wasn't in use" on Monday. This is clearly dumb. If they were to ask me the date of the last phone call I made on the phone, that would be a completely different question--but they ask "When were you last using the phone?" when submitting a claim. I don't know how other carriers and insurance companies handle this.
4. Use the iCloud restore with WiFi: As I mentioned earlier, I will never attempt to setup a new iPhone from scratch again. It is a time consuming hassle. In my case, as soon as I reset my backup iPhone 13, my iPad immediately detected the phone and offered to restore the phone for me. While I had access to WiFi, I tapped one button on the iPad, and the restore process started. A few minutes later, my iPhone 13 was up and running. I still had to login to nearly every app on the phone, but at least everything was installed and ready to go. Make sure to have a power cord for the phone, as the restore process and subsequent setup uses a lot of CPU on the phone, draining the battery quickly.
5. Activate an eSIM on the backup phone: I attempted to activate a new eSIM online with AT&T, but I got a weird error that a payment was due on the device. Not sure what this was about, but it meant I had to call the AT&T International support number to have someone manually enter the new IMEI and enable eSIM for the new phone. I was then able to open the iPhone 13 cellular settings and install the AT&T eSIM. The phone was then immediately active. I had to reboot the phone and wait a few minutes for the phone to connect to the El Salvador cellular carrier, but after a few minutes, it was working fine and iMessages went through.
6. Spend lots of time logging into apps: Logging back into email and apps is a major hassle. I have all of my standard TOTP codes and Passkeys stored in my password manager, which is on my iPad, so that made life easy. But since I didn't have all of my MS accounts setup in MS Authenticator on my iPad, I was stuck trying to reconfigure the MS accounts on my phone--which is a very time consuming hassle.
Despite the inconvenience of losing a phone, while on vacation, in another country, and despite the annoyance that my phone insurance claim has been denied so far, having a backup phone saved the day. I continued my vacation without interruption.
Hopefully I don't lose another phone, but now that I have, I feel more comfortable navigating the process.
Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP in Los Angeles. He works with Dynamics 365 Business Central and related technologies.
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