Every day, people write to me, asking to help recover or track their lost or stolen cell phones after reading my blog. They usually give me a phone number, or their IMEI number and email. Well I usually do not reply to these types of enquiries as it serves no purpose.

So does GPS cell phone tracking really works or is it just a joke?

Well cell phone tracking is not a joke, but the answer to above question is both yes and no.

You can track a cell phone only:

  • Your cell phone is GPS enabled, that is, your cell phone has built-in GPS chip.
  • You have installed some kind of cell phone tracking software and activated before your mobile phone get lost or stolen, and is not being removed after.
  • Your cell phone is on, that is, it’s not being turned off by someone. This is very important as the thieves usually turn it off after getting the mobile phone.
  • Your cell phone can access the internet at the time, this usually means a data plan as WiFi connection is not reliable when your mobile phone get stolen.

So yes you can always track your cell phone and someone wrote to me saying that they used the tracking softwares introduced in my blog and they worked. But if you do not meet the above-said requirements and the answer is no, you can not recover your cell phone, there is actually a story out there that a man called happywaffle get his iPhone back via Find My Iphone.

However you can turn to your service provider and they can get the approximate location based on repeater triangulation. Mobile phone sends out signal from time to time to the towers, so your service provider can use this feature to determine the location of your cell phone with a precision of 150 meters, but if someone changed the SIM card, your carrier could do nothing except that they can still block that mobile phone, and they usually decline any such request as well.

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