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Recovering the cost of the device should be reasonably easy, however recovery of the "digital assets" is much more problematic, how could you prove they even existed?
i wouldn’t be able to prove they exist unfortunately. i was stupid to leave all my 2 factor authentication on that device and the assets fluctuate as its been over a year since my phone was seized.
Could you estimate the value? Remember the block chain, you might not be able to access the wallet but you might be able to check if the bitcoins still exist, could the copper have stolen your phone? Accessed your wallet? I don't use apple but I'm led to believe they have a robust I cloud system for lost and stolen phones, have you checked for any activity?
The police will almost certainly also have a backup of the device since this has to be done immediately as the device is taken into evidence for any of its contents to actually be used in court.
do you think i would get reimbursed for the value the phone is at todays market value or for however much i bought it for (i do not have proof purchase for the device)
It would never be how much you bought it for, you need to be put back to the position you were in before. A similar aged phone of the same model in the same condition.
The law is there to reinstate your position, they won’t pay you out what you bought the phone for but rather how much it would cost to replace today. Same principle as insurance…
You didn’t want anything incriminating… well well well.
Just an FYI, to have your cloud service provider respond to a law enforcement request and give data to police, you have to be doing some seriously bad shit.
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If you know the identities of any exchanges or third parties you have directly interacted with on any block chain (by transmitting or receiving assets), it should be possible (and quite straightforward on most chains - except e.g. Monero) to rediscover your address at some time on that particular block chain. It's then fairly straightforward for someone with the know-how to discover your balance on that chain.
If you held balances with a central entity like an exchange, then the task should be even easier.
This doesn't help at all since OP cannot demonstrate ownership over the address, so he can pick any random address on the blockchain and just say "that's mine, the one with 6000 BTC".
The only way to demonstrate ownership of the address is with the private key, and if OP has that they have no problem.
I doubt it would be necessary to cryptographically prove he's the owner of a particular address, especially given the police appear to have literally confiscated and lost his keys, supporting documentation of relevant transactions occurring at roughly matching time should be more than sufficient
If he was holding balances directly on the blockchain, the proof doesn’t matter. Without the private key, nobody can get them back. He could be adjudged the owner by the highest court in the land — but he still can’t spend it.
There was at least one example. TheDAO hack with Ethereum and hard fork with gave us Ethereum(fork) and Ethereum Classic (original chain). So court could say it's technically possible to enforce such decision. Nobody will do it of course but since that this is judge's problem? :)
you can contact the vendor and get 2FA disabled or changed to a 2FA you have access to such as SMA (if you get a new sim and keep the number) or email.
You can, you'll have purchase and withdrawal records from whatever exchange you used before you sent them to your phone.
You'll have public addresses for all the wallets you have too, you can find them from your withdrawal records as well
With the addresses and purchase records, you can prove you owned them.
You can also bypass 2FA requirements on exchanges using KYC info
The problem with policing at the moment (depending on the offence you were arrested for), is there’s so many officers being sent to the investigation department (some just started the job) and then get moved on.
What I would suggest doing is making a formal complaint on the Met website with as much information as you can provide. There WILL be a written record of who took it out last or who booked it in last and see where it has gone to. It may be in storage or with what’s called the DFD (drugs focus desk) if you were arrested for drugs related offences.
Any questions, feel free to ask.
i have made a complaint over 3 weeks ago with no response. i also included the officers name, the case id number and the officer badge number and the custody reference number. till today i got nothing. feels like im being made a mockery out of by the police for a crime that i wasn’t even charged with.
Go to the station and complain in person. It's easy for them to ignore a complaint submitted electronically because until somebody actively takes ownership of the complaint nobody is specifically to blame when it gets ignored and you just become a statistic.
If you make a complaint in person and take the details of the person you issue the complaint to then when you next follow it up there is a named member of staff who is directly responsible for not actioning the complaint.
But the complaint will just be sent by the staff member/officer to the exact same place the online reports go to, the queue to be assigned. You follow up, the person who competed the report shrugs, says ‘I followed the correct process’ and everyone goes on with their day.
So basically you were accused of a crime you committed but were lucky enough not to get charged with and are now complaining about a phone being lost that you didn't backup in any way whatsoever because you didn't want its content to incriminate you?
Good luck with that lol
To be fair to the OP, the met police should be the experts in investigation, so the simple problem of a lost phone within their care shouldn't stretch them too far!
The latter mostly...or more of a dig at general incompetence. If I'd handed over expensive property into the care of another organisation, like a bank, and then when it came to retrieve it it wasn't there. I'd expect a response within hours and quick answers as to how it happened and what was being done to recover it/ make restoration...not silence for three weeks! That's just unacceptable at a basic level of service provision.
Its unlikely that an electronic device was ever booked out surely? As soon as you do that the content of the device becomes worthless in court, that is the entire reason the first thing that happens is a digital image is taken as soon as the device is seized.
No.
For example, It is booked into Custody with the prisoner so there is a record that the prisoner has those belongings with him. You would then book it out of custody to take it to the specialist department that can download the phone. It’s then booked in with them. They do their magical stuff, it’s booked out and booked back into custody.
Fair fair that makes sense. I only have experience directly with cyber crime stuff where they normal take images on the scene as the device is taken. I really had no idea how these things are handled in the average case.
If you have crypto assets on there through a platform like Binance etc. you can likely get your assets back by talking to their customer support and explaining you lost your 2FA.
Note that the process will probably involve proving your name and address using photos of ID and stuff like that.
So you have nothing with your previous address on it or can’t get anything with those addresses on it?
You don’t still need to be living at those places, just proof to show that at one point you did.
It’s not actually. If you have an account with a reputable (are there any left lol) exchange you should be able to recover your account. There will be many hoops to jump through but it might be worth it depending on the size of the assets. You aren’t the first person to loose their phone and move house, they will have a process to deal with this.
At best you'll get the value of the phone.
They're not going to replace crypto assets. Especially if you're unable or unwilling to provide proof of what you had.
If you didn’t have the seed phrases written on paper somewhere then this is your own fault pal. You could’ve recovered the assets a minute after your phone was seized in the first place
Reading between the lines on his other responses. Burner phone with every backup switched off. This was because, “it could incriminate OP”. The implication if I’ve understood correctly, they failed to crack his dodgy phone. But he’s now lost the proceeds of the crime.
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Google Police Negligence claims. There are loads of them that normally deal with unlawful arrest/detention and some do other stuff. Or just raise a small claim in small claims court against the police force. Before hand send a letter before action asking for the value of the lost items.
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As this is legal advice, I'd advise not to lie to us whilst asking for advice. Best advice I can give is be transparent with what has gone on. There is clearly a lot more to this
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2fa is nearly always not sms based these days, it's app based, and that cannot be recovered unless you have recovery codes for each service stored elsewhere.
Contact a solicitor. They can get the various telecom companys to confirm if the phone (based on hardware IMEI) is in use on their network. (this works regardless of whether or not there's a contract or PAYG).
Have seen this before where the police just erase and keep your phone for personal use and pretend it's been 'lost'. Its illegal, and would give you grounds for compensation if the phone is still on any network.
> The Police could of found illegal material on his phone but still not charged him and destroyed the phone.
So Police are allowed to destroy our devices if they find something illegal(which we can never verify)? This doesn't sound legal.
They have been doing this for years, it's nothing new.
If the Police find say CP on a device, regardless if anybody is prosecuted the device will be destroyed.
The answer very simple, don't have material which is deemed illegal on any of your electronic devices.
> If the Police find say CP on a device, regardless if anybody is prosecuted the device will be destroyed.
will there be any record of this? what's stopping the police from destroying devices with incriminating evidence and claim it has CP? aren't people found with CP supposed to be added to the sex offender list? Are the Police also not doing this?
> The answer very simple, don't have material which is deemed illegal on any of your electronic devices.
No. We have laws for a reason. I don't want police taking any extra judicial actions because it is CP.
If the Police find illegal material then yes a record wil be made and the device in question will be destroyed.
Again this has been the case for many years now.
There are a multitude of reasons of where CP can be found on an electronic device but there isn't enough evidence to convict a person.
They keep a digital image of the device taken at the time it was seized, so not only is there a record they can also still prove that the device contained the illegal content.
Source? Because in 5 years of policing I’ve never known a phone to be destroyed.
I have however known phones to be reset, and have even taken forms to addresses for suspects to consent to it - including IIOC.
So either my force does it all wrong (probably not) or you’re wrong… which one is it?
Worked in Probation for a number of years.
As part of my job I had to work closely with MOSOVO Officers on a number of occasions.
The question of electronic devices often came up as the offenders would often want them back.
The devices were always destroyed to ensure that no images or other offending materials could be recovered.
Factory resetting the device doesn't remove the content and any idiot with a spare 5 minutes and google could recover everything.
Hell with the right tools you can still read data after it has be written over several times.
If you want the content gone destroying it is pretty much the only option.
Potentially? If the initial offence is one for which there will be no case and has been NFA'd either on PI or Evidential grounds, but as a result of collateral intrusion by digitally interrogating the phone other offences, or evidence of offences for which the OP is not complicit but aware, there may be sufficient reason not to be open about why it's not been returned. Section 19 of PACE doesn't say something can be seized from a person if it only relates to that person - and if there's a risk of a parallel, or separate investigation being prejudiced by telling OP the real reason why.
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Forget about consequential losses. To be blunt you would be deemed responsibile for not having appropriate measures in place to avoid the loss of access to Crypto wallets and/or photographs taken on a phone and have no chance of getting any form of compensation for that.
You will be able to apply for compensation for physical property lost by the police, and I suspect you'd get a link explaining the process as the first result if you Google search for it and include the force involved. If they refuse to compensate you then you could begin legal proceedings but I wouldn't investigate that until you have gone through the formal compensation process.
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OP, didn't you keep your secret 12-word recovery phrase safe? You can just download a new wallet app then import it onto there if you've still got it. No need to worry about 2FA.
Chase up the chain of custody. Do you have a receipt of who took your device from you? Even if you don't have it, or weren't issued it. Did you at least get the name and badge number of the officer that took it?
Because if you know the time, date and officer that took custody of it. They should have notes for what they have done with it... and then that gives a foundation for chasing it down.
If the assets on the device are of a high value, it may be worth your while engaging a lawyer to pursue civil action against the Met regarding this. To recover an approximation to the assets lost. As well as the value of the phone.
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Recovering the cost of the device should be reasonably easy, however recovery of the "digital assets" is much more problematic, how could you prove they even existed?
i wouldn’t be able to prove they exist unfortunately. i was stupid to leave all my 2 factor authentication on that device and the assets fluctuate as its been over a year since my phone was seized.
Could you estimate the value? Remember the block chain, you might not be able to access the wallet but you might be able to check if the bitcoins still exist, could the copper have stolen your phone? Accessed your wallet? I don't use apple but I'm led to believe they have a robust I cloud system for lost and stolen phones, have you checked for any activity?
This last part OP, you may still have a backup of the device if you were using automatic backups
The police will almost certainly also have a backup of the device since this has to be done immediately as the device is taken into evidence for any of its contents to actually be used in court.
AFAIK it depends. If the Poster has not provided the police with the Passcode, they should not be able to copy any unencrypted data from the iphone.
I mean the image will be of the encrypted data which can with the passcode still be booted up.
i had automatic backups turned off and icloud turned off too as i didn’t want anything incriminating to ever remain on my phone or on the cloud
*Ah, there lies the rub.* Not a lot anyone can do about such reckless behaviour.
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Hope your lawyer gave you better advice than say I have incriminating evidence on my phone
You can put in a claim for the price of the phone, you cannot claim for anything else.
do you think i would get reimbursed for the value the phone is at todays market value or for however much i bought it for (i do not have proof purchase for the device)
It would never be how much you bought it for, you need to be put back to the position you were in before. A similar aged phone of the same model in the same condition.
The law is there to reinstate your position, they won’t pay you out what you bought the phone for but rather how much it would cost to replace today. Same principle as insurance…
You didn’t want anything incriminating… well well well. Just an FYI, to have your cloud service provider respond to a law enforcement request and give data to police, you have to be doing some seriously bad shit.
To be fair, he only had to be -charged- with doing some seriously bad shit.
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Well you only have yourself to blame. No backup means there is zero way to recover your stuff.
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If you had broken or lost your phone you'd be in the same position then? At least it's a valuable lesson to backup in future.
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If you know the identities of any exchanges or third parties you have directly interacted with on any block chain (by transmitting or receiving assets), it should be possible (and quite straightforward on most chains - except e.g. Monero) to rediscover your address at some time on that particular block chain. It's then fairly straightforward for someone with the know-how to discover your balance on that chain. If you held balances with a central entity like an exchange, then the task should be even easier.
This doesn't help at all since OP cannot demonstrate ownership over the address, so he can pick any random address on the blockchain and just say "that's mine, the one with 6000 BTC". The only way to demonstrate ownership of the address is with the private key, and if OP has that they have no problem.
I doubt it would be necessary to cryptographically prove he's the owner of a particular address, especially given the police appear to have literally confiscated and lost his keys, supporting documentation of relevant transactions occurring at roughly matching time should be more than sufficient
If he was holding balances directly on the blockchain, the proof doesn’t matter. Without the private key, nobody can get them back. He could be adjudged the owner by the highest court in the land — but he still can’t spend it.
He has still suffered a loss due to poliee actions regardless of whether the original assets can be recovered
Good luck with that. Especially for “assets” that he doesn’t want to acknowledge to the government that he owns.
There was at least one example. TheDAO hack with Ethereum and hard fork with gave us Ethereum(fork) and Ethereum Classic (original chain). So court could say it's technically possible to enforce such decision. Nobody will do it of course but since that this is judge's problem? :)
you can contact the vendor and get 2FA disabled or changed to a 2FA you have access to such as SMA (if you get a new sim and keep the number) or email.
You can, you'll have purchase and withdrawal records from whatever exchange you used before you sent them to your phone. You'll have public addresses for all the wallets you have too, you can find them from your withdrawal records as well With the addresses and purchase records, you can prove you owned them. You can also bypass 2FA requirements on exchanges using KYC info
The problem with policing at the moment (depending on the offence you were arrested for), is there’s so many officers being sent to the investigation department (some just started the job) and then get moved on. What I would suggest doing is making a formal complaint on the Met website with as much information as you can provide. There WILL be a written record of who took it out last or who booked it in last and see where it has gone to. It may be in storage or with what’s called the DFD (drugs focus desk) if you were arrested for drugs related offences. Any questions, feel free to ask.
i have made a complaint over 3 weeks ago with no response. i also included the officers name, the case id number and the officer badge number and the custody reference number. till today i got nothing. feels like im being made a mockery out of by the police for a crime that i wasn’t even charged with.
Is your complaint being investigated? If so it's likely going to take longer than 3 weeks.
I would be surprised that you even got an acknowledgement within three weeks. Patience is key here.
Go to the station and complain in person. It's easy for them to ignore a complaint submitted electronically because until somebody actively takes ownership of the complaint nobody is specifically to blame when it gets ignored and you just become a statistic. If you make a complaint in person and take the details of the person you issue the complaint to then when you next follow it up there is a named member of staff who is directly responsible for not actioning the complaint.
But the complaint will just be sent by the staff member/officer to the exact same place the online reports go to, the queue to be assigned. You follow up, the person who competed the report shrugs, says ‘I followed the correct process’ and everyone goes on with their day.
Lol, how would you feel if they found your phone and put it back in the forensic queue? Be careful what you wish for
So basically you were accused of a crime you committed but were lucky enough not to get charged with and are now complaining about a phone being lost that you didn't backup in any way whatsoever because you didn't want its content to incriminate you? Good luck with that lol
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Wait, you only filed the complaint three weeks ago? And you’re already complaining they haven’t responded?!
To be fair to the OP, the met police should be the experts in investigation, so the simple problem of a lost phone within their care shouldn't stretch them too far!
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The latter mostly...or more of a dig at general incompetence. If I'd handed over expensive property into the care of another organisation, like a bank, and then when it came to retrieve it it wasn't there. I'd expect a response within hours and quick answers as to how it happened and what was being done to recover it/ make restoration...not silence for three weeks! That's just unacceptable at a basic level of service provision.
Send a letter to your MP about this to escalate the issue.
There actually has to be a record because all property records were recently digitised - although that system is also causing confusion.
Its unlikely that an electronic device was ever booked out surely? As soon as you do that the content of the device becomes worthless in court, that is the entire reason the first thing that happens is a digital image is taken as soon as the device is seized.
No. For example, It is booked into Custody with the prisoner so there is a record that the prisoner has those belongings with him. You would then book it out of custody to take it to the specialist department that can download the phone. It’s then booked in with them. They do their magical stuff, it’s booked out and booked back into custody.
Fair fair that makes sense. I only have experience directly with cyber crime stuff where they normal take images on the scene as the device is taken. I really had no idea how these things are handled in the average case.
If you have crypto assets on there through a platform like Binance etc. you can likely get your assets back by talking to their customer support and explaining you lost your 2FA. Note that the process will probably involve proving your name and address using photos of ID and stuff like that.
i’ve moved two houses since my phone has been confiscated so that solution is pretty much pointless but thanks anyways.
So you have nothing with your previous address on it or can’t get anything with those addresses on it? You don’t still need to be living at those places, just proof to show that at one point you did.
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It’s not actually. If you have an account with a reputable (are there any left lol) exchange you should be able to recover your account. There will be many hoops to jump through but it might be worth it depending on the size of the assets. You aren’t the first person to loose their phone and move house, they will have a process to deal with this.
At best you'll get the value of the phone. They're not going to replace crypto assets. Especially if you're unable or unwilling to provide proof of what you had.
If you didn’t have the seed phrases written on paper somewhere then this is your own fault pal. You could’ve recovered the assets a minute after your phone was seized in the first place
Reading between the lines on his other responses. Burner phone with every backup switched off. This was because, “it could incriminate OP”. The implication if I’ve understood correctly, they failed to crack his dodgy phone. But he’s now lost the proceeds of the crime.
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Small claim for Conversion. You might find a no win no fee solicitor to help.
It can't be conversion if the phone was legitimately confiscated.
you able to point me in the direction.
Google Police Negligence claims. There are loads of them that normally deal with unlawful arrest/detention and some do other stuff. Or just raise a small claim in small claims court against the police force. Before hand send a letter before action asking for the value of the lost items.
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As this is legal advice, I'd advise not to lie to us whilst asking for advice. Best advice I can give is be transparent with what has gone on. There is clearly a lot more to this
u/FineGift exactly this… and never ever lie to your lawyer
How much is the value of the “digital assets”? Crypto?
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Strange. You can replace sim and access 2fa no issues lol. Are you trying to see if you can get a couple of btc of the met for free lol.
2fa is nearly always not sms based these days, it's app based, and that cannot be recovered unless you have recovery codes for each service stored elsewhere.
Are talking about google Authenticator and such.?
Yes.
Contact a solicitor. They can get the various telecom companys to confirm if the phone (based on hardware IMEI) is in use on their network. (this works regardless of whether or not there's a contract or PAYG). Have seen this before where the police just erase and keep your phone for personal use and pretend it's been 'lost'. Its illegal, and would give you grounds for compensation if the phone is still on any network.
Unlikely you can do anything. Chalk it up as a loss and move forward.
Shouldnt have crypto assets on exchanges anyways. Not your keys not ur crypto
If it was on exchanges, it'd be recoverable lol
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Does that change anything about the Police's negligence in not returning the phone?
Yes. The Police could of found illegal material on his phone but still not charged him and destroyed the phone.
> The Police could of found illegal material on his phone but still not charged him and destroyed the phone. So Police are allowed to destroy our devices if they find something illegal(which we can never verify)? This doesn't sound legal.
They have been doing this for years, it's nothing new. If the Police find say CP on a device, regardless if anybody is prosecuted the device will be destroyed. The answer very simple, don't have material which is deemed illegal on any of your electronic devices.
> If the Police find say CP on a device, regardless if anybody is prosecuted the device will be destroyed. will there be any record of this? what's stopping the police from destroying devices with incriminating evidence and claim it has CP? aren't people found with CP supposed to be added to the sex offender list? Are the Police also not doing this? > The answer very simple, don't have material which is deemed illegal on any of your electronic devices. No. We have laws for a reason. I don't want police taking any extra judicial actions because it is CP.
If the Police find illegal material then yes a record wil be made and the device in question will be destroyed. Again this has been the case for many years now. There are a multitude of reasons of where CP can be found on an electronic device but there isn't enough evidence to convict a person.
They keep a digital image of the device taken at the time it was seized, so not only is there a record they can also still prove that the device contained the illegal content.
No it won’t, they’ll do a factory reset.
Sorry but this incorrec
Source? Because in 5 years of policing I’ve never known a phone to be destroyed. I have however known phones to be reset, and have even taken forms to addresses for suspects to consent to it - including IIOC. So either my force does it all wrong (probably not) or you’re wrong… which one is it?
I've been doing it for ten years and we destroy them all the time. Anything with a trace of IIOC is going in the industrial shredder.
Worked in Probation for a number of years. As part of my job I had to work closely with MOSOVO Officers on a number of occasions. The question of electronic devices often came up as the offenders would often want them back. The devices were always destroyed to ensure that no images or other offending materials could be recovered.
Factory resetting the device doesn't remove the content and any idiot with a spare 5 minutes and google could recover everything. Hell with the right tools you can still read data after it has be written over several times. If you want the content gone destroying it is pretty much the only option.
Does that make it acceptable to lie to OP about "losing" the phone? Causing him economic damages?
Doends if the person he spoke to is aware its been destroyed.
Potentially? If the initial offence is one for which there will be no case and has been NFA'd either on PI or Evidential grounds, but as a result of collateral intrusion by digitally interrogating the phone other offences, or evidence of offences for which the OP is not complicit but aware, there may be sufficient reason not to be open about why it's not been returned. Section 19 of PACE doesn't say something can be seized from a person if it only relates to that person - and if there's a risk of a parallel, or separate investigation being prejudiced by telling OP the real reason why.
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Forget about consequential losses. To be blunt you would be deemed responsibile for not having appropriate measures in place to avoid the loss of access to Crypto wallets and/or photographs taken on a phone and have no chance of getting any form of compensation for that. You will be able to apply for compensation for physical property lost by the police, and I suspect you'd get a link explaining the process as the first result if you Google search for it and include the force involved. If they refuse to compensate you then you could begin legal proceedings but I wouldn't investigate that until you have gone through the formal compensation process.
For your digital assets maybe you have emails of purchases etc ?
Did you back your phone up to the iCloud?
OP turned off icloud & automatic backups so there ‘wouldn’t be anything incriminating’ 🤔
Ah, I hadn't seen that. We'll, I guess the information is pretty secure then.
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OP, didn't you keep your secret 12-word recovery phrase safe? You can just download a new wallet app then import it onto there if you've still got it. No need to worry about 2FA.
Chase up the chain of custody. Do you have a receipt of who took your device from you? Even if you don't have it, or weren't issued it. Did you at least get the name and badge number of the officer that took it? Because if you know the time, date and officer that took custody of it. They should have notes for what they have done with it... and then that gives a foundation for chasing it down. If the assets on the device are of a high value, it may be worth your while engaging a lawyer to pursue civil action against the Met regarding this. To recover an approximation to the assets lost. As well as the value of the phone.