How to find & lock down a lost iPhone
Use Find My iPhone to locate — and lock down — your misplaced devices
Having an iOS device or your Mac stolen is devastating. Worse, however, is the potential for your data to be stolen or used to commit fraud.
Thankfully, Apple has put a number of features in place to help prevent the worst case scenario from happening.
The first thing you should do when you realize that your iPhone, iPad, or Mac is missing is to activate Lost Mode by signing in to iCloud.com using a web browser. Bear in mind that as a minimum, your iOS device will need to be running iOS 6 or later for Lost Mode to work.
Lost Mode lets you place a message on your missing device’s screen; it turns off alerts for messages and notifications, so they don’t show on the Lock screen; and it disables Apple Pay and suspends the use of any registered cards in the Wallet app.
You can also use Find My iPhone to track an iOS device’s location, though you’ll only be able to track a locked Mac if it’s near a previously used Wi–Fi network. If your device is registered with your iCloud account and you have Find My iPhone set up, Activation Lock means that even if your data is erased, the device can’t be used without the passcode.
There is also a feature that allows you to set your iOS device to be automatically erased after 10 failed passcode attempts. While risky, after the first five times, the device is ‘frozen’ for a minute, only usable for emergency calls. The time it’s frozen for increases after each failed attempt.