Lost or Stolen Apple Watch: How to Locate it

Apple products, with few exceptions, are usually devices that cost a lot of money and that replacing them usually entails a large investment of money. Therefore, it is vital that, in the event that an Apple device is lost or stolen, you fully understand the steps you have to follow to try to recover it. Today we show you in this post what you have to do if your Apple Watch is stolen, or lost.

Find your Apple Watch with the Search app

If unfortunately you have had the bad luck that your Apple Watch has been stolen or you have lost, the first step that we recommend is to try to find it, or rather, try to know what the location is, that is, where it is at that moment. your Apple watch. For this you have the Search application on your iPhone that will help you first, to locate it, and later, to protect it, but we will talk about this later.

For now we will focus on trying to locate its location. If you’ve set Search on your iPhone paired with your Apple Watch, it will automatically be turned on on your Apple Watch as well, so you can use the Find app to find your Apple Watch. To find the watch in the Search app, you have to take into account the model of your Apple Watch. All those models that have GPS will use it together with a secure WiFi connection to broadcast their location, in the case of the Apple Watch Series 1, which does not have GPS, what you will see will be the location of the linked iPhone.

To see your Apple Watch on the map you can choose two ways. The first, through a computer.

Go to iCloud.com and sign in with your Apple ID.
Open Find iPhone.
Click All Devices and choose your Apple Watch.

If you want to do it through the iPhone, follow the following steps.

Open the Search app.
Select the Devices tab.
Select Apple Watch to see the device’s location on the map.

In case you locate the clock and it is close to your location, you can make it emit a sound to be able to locate it easily, in this way the clock will begin to beep until you press Cancel. If, on the other hand, you cannot locate the watch, it will be because it is not connected to a Wi-Fi network, to mobile data or to the linked iPhone.

Activate Apple Watch Lost Mode

As we mentioned before, another of the options you have with the Search app is to be able to protect your device, that is, protect all the data and content that is inside your Apple Watch. For this you have the activation of the Lost mode. With this mode you can automatically block it and make sure that the moment the watch has a connection you can show your phone number on your watch screen so that they can contact you and return your device.

To activate the lost mode you can do it by entering the Search app of an iOS device following the following steps.

Open Search and tap or click on Apple Watch.
Tap Activate in the Mark as lost section.
Click Continue.
Enter a phone number where they can reach you and press Next.
Enter the message you want to display on the clock screen.
Touch Activate.

The app will send you an email to confirm that you’ve put your Apple Watch in lost mode.

Report it to the authorities

If you have not finally been able to locate your Apple Watch and recover it, after having activated the lost mode, we recommend that you file a theft report by providing all the data from your Apple Watch. In this way, if the authorities recovered your device, they could contact you to return you and recover your Apple watch in this way. It is very important that you provide the serial number and IMEI of the device, data that you can find in the box of your Apple Watch.

Contact your phone company

In the event that your Apple Watch is an LTE model and has a mobile data rate incorporated, we recommend that you contact your telephone company to disable said card mode and thus prevent other people from using your watch to perform calls or connect to the internet.

Change your Apple ID password and remove Apple Watch from trusted devices.

In addition to blocking the Apple Watch and making the corresponding complaint to the authorities, it is vital that you change the password of all the services to which you have access through the Apple Watch, starting with the Apple ID password and including those social networks and services to which someone else could have access if they manage to unlock your Apple Watch.

Another action that we recommend you carry out is to remove the Apple watch from the list of trusted devices so that, in this way, this device does not receive the two-factor authentication codes. To do this, you just have to access your account page for your Apple ID, go to the Devices section and delete the Apple Watch.

What if you find the smartwatch?

If fortunately your Apple Watch appears, what you have to do is deactivate the Lost mode of your watch. To do this, unlock the watch, enter the password and go. If you want to do this process through your computer, follow the steps below.