Martin Lewis<\/a> detailed the simple steps everyone ought to complete immediately to protect their device.<\/p>\nThis comes after recent calls from MPs on the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, arguing that technology firms aren’t doing sufficient work to combat mobile phone theft.<\/p>\n
The committee voiced its concerns regarding why these firms haven’t implemented measures to stop stolen handsets from accessing cloud accounts from overseas. Mobile handset theft has emerged as an escalating problem in recent years, especially in London where roughly 80,000 devices were taken last year, based on Metropolitan Police figures.<\/p>\n
Numerous devices ultimately get transported abroad, with the Met claiming earlier in October that a single smuggling operation had dispatched up to 40,000 stolen handsets from the UK to China over the past year. Mr Lewis suggested that individuals should first download a particular app.<\/p>\n
He said: “Everybody who’s got a smartphone, if you’re Apple, if it’s find my device, if you’re Android, it’s the smart things app, then you can locate it, but also you can switch off payments. It doesn’t stop your phone being sold on, but it reduces the risk, cause let’s be really plain, two risks for your phone being nicked one, you lose it, you have to claim on your insurance and get it back, and two, they can access your information.”<\/p>\n
Mr Lewis emphasised further mobile security measures users ought to enable – especially concerning banking applications. He declared: “Make sure your biometrics are set up, your face or fingerprint ID both on your phone. And your banking apps, that’s very important, not just on one, make sure it’s on both.”<\/p>\n
He subsequently encouraged everyone to input a particular five-digit sequence into their devices: “Next one, everybody do this now. Type into your phone *#06#. Rachel’s making a note. That’s *#06#. You’ll get it like what looks like a series of barcodes come up, those are your IMEI numbers. Screen grab those, email them to yourself, that’s the ID you’ll need if your phone’s nicked, so that you can recognise your phone, *#06#.”<\/p>\n
‘For the latest money saving tips, shopping and consumer news, go to the new Everything Money website’ You can input that code via the dialler. The specialist recommended disabling preview notifications: “Next, really important this one, and you’ll understand why, turn off your preview notifications. So you know when you, when you pay for something and they send you the text code, yeah, that comes through. That’s fine when your phone is unlocked and you’re on it, but if you have preview notifications, it will show that code on the lock screen.<\/p>\n
“If you turn off preview notifications, it tells you you’ve got a message but doesn’t include the code. So if someone nicks your phone and then. They can’t see that code, so turn off preview notifications, and the final one I’d say is go onto your phone, look at the security settings of your particular phone and go and have a play and see what security settings there are. None of this will stop your phone being nicked, but it reduces the risk of you being defrauded if your phone is nicked. It protects you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martin Lewis has warned all iPhone and Android smartphone users to make simple changes now and they need…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2897,2306,86,56,54,55,2932],"class_list":{"0":"post-474935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-martin-lewis","9":"tag-mobile","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom","14":"tag-your-money"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Martin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1773478577_818_0_martnew2PNG.png\")
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