Caboose

Phone manufacturers, police forces and various other people have got together to create immobilise.com, publicising the shared database used to lock out stolen mobile phones.

This is a great advance over the previous failure by phone companies to share the IMEIs (the unique identifying number of each handset) of stolen phones.

However this still isn’t a guarantee that stolen phones can’t be used again. With most phones reprogramming the IMEI is trivial — if illegal — and the manufacturers’ attempts at preventing it are usually feeble.

A quick internet search will reveal lots of sites providing information on reprogramming phones. The manufacturers’ idea of IMEI protection often only seems to consist of such advanced techniques as storing two copies, one of them obscured in some trivial way.