Locked phone with a pin

[MsVirgo87]

I noticed that now when u find a phone it's no point even keeping it anymore especially if they have a pin and even when u factory reset the phone u still need a pin or an email associated with that phone to unlock it, Does anyone know a way around this? Or should I just throw the phone away?

[realaud]

That's the whole point. To make it useless to anyone finding or stealing it.

[MsVirgo87]

That's smart, My sister bf found it and tried to return it but the owner never came for the phone and they had it for 2 months, And someone in this forum acting like I stole the phone when it was given to me but we didn't know about the pin situation, I'm not hard up for no phone, I already have my own phone so why would I need another phone for

[realaud]

I guess the owner didn't put their contact info on the lock screen. For future reference, if you slide up on the lock screen where you enter the pin, if you tap emergency call, it should bring up the emergency contacts. If they designated emergency contacts, you can call one of them. That's how I recovered my sister's lost phone, while she was out buying a replacement. She did not know about the find my phone feature, and possibly neither did the original owner of your found phone. The original owner may just have considered it lost and bought another.

[MsVirgo87]

The crazy thing is when my sister bf found the phone there was no sim card in it to contact the owner or anything u just mentioned which is why they put up flyers and put it on Facebook so I can't contact the owner of the phone

[realaud]

You dont actually need a SIM card to access the emergency contacts, a tapping one to call counts as an emegency call that does not need a SIM.

[MsVirgo87]

Okay I will try that, Idk why they didn't try it

[realaud]

Because, they either didn't know they could do it without a SIM, or didn't know how to access the emergency information.

The owner could have also been using an older device as an internet only device or e reader as secondary to their primary device and that's why they weren't looking for it.

[realaud]

I had a thought that because there was no SIM, it may already have been stolen and tossed by the theif when they discovered it was useless.

[MsVirgo87]

Yes that's what I thought also that someone stole it.

[realaud]

The bottom line is found Samsung phones are useless to the finder, thief.