I’m running Graphene on a Pixel 6. I lost it and someone opened it somehow and called two of my contacts to give it back.
I’m a bit confused how this even happened. When I got the phone back, they were going through my contacts. I checked app usage stats and they went through a banking app (not missing money), maps, signal, etc.
Is there a way to figure out how they even unlocked my phone?
Wouldn’t a thief just factory reset and sell it, instead of taking the additional risk of returning it?
Unless they installed some spyware to try to steal more passwords, or duplicated the 2fa auth keys, or have some rmeote viewer app running now to steal text 2fa keys, or whatever else. You could steal way more in the long term than the couple of hundred that a used phone would go for.
You need the pin/password, regardless if the phone was unlocked or you fooled the biometric scanner, to wipe it. If you factory reset it by the recovery method, it will want the Google account that was last signed in before it lets you proceed. it’s been years since I had to do this, but it is a nice attempt to reduce phone thefts. (that is (might be?) nullified on graphene as it can skip the gps package, but for the usual user it’s a nice feature)