Simple Technique to Find a Lost Person’s Location via Mobile Phone in India

Usually people are worried about finding a missing person’s identity via mobile phones or tracking devices. Though there are no official tools or services to track anyone, you can still simply track down your targeted contact number with your common sense. Though this simple tip might sound little stupid, you can still find a persons identity easily. Especially when you are in India, you got to make the best out of your common sense. We all know that each state in India has a different language, and so does the network provider. You have to understand the simple concept of roaming, so that you simply guess the correct location of a person.
Whenever a you travel through a different state in India, you might have observed a welcome message from the respective mobile network provider about the current state and roaming details. This is where the person blows off his cover in India. Say for example a person from Hyderabad is traveling to a unknown location, then the only option to track him is via Mobile Network Provider. You have to do just call  that person, and wait for his response. If that person lifts your call, then there is noting you can do except talking to him. And if the call has not been connected or answered in any way, then there is a possibility to find his correct location. Usually this trick works when the target phone is either

1. Call Waiting
2. Switched Off
3. Not Reachable

Each of these 3 options have different settings, as the IVR (Interactive voice response) will play the recorded message separately. So if a person from Hyderabad has traveled to Mumbai, then you will hear 3 different languages via IVR if not answering your call. English and Hindi are common for all the states, where as the regional language Telugu (Hyderabad) will surely change to Marathi (Mumbai) at any cost. This is where you can first get an idea that a person is currently located in Maharashtra. But how to know where exactly he is located in Maharashtra.

http://tracker.mobileringtonesstore.com/

http://m.mobileringtonesstore.com/mobiletracker.php?

http://www.indiatrace.com/

http://www.mobilenumbertracker.com/

http://www.internet4mobile.com/mobile_number_information.aspx

http://trace.bharatiyamobile.com/

http://bmobile.in/

http://www.findandtrace.com/

https://www.truecaller.com

http://www.latlong.net/convert-address-to-lat-long.html

http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/latitudelongitude-finder/

Trace Mobile Number Using SMS

If you don’t have internet connection to trace mobile number location then your can use SMS based application service to trace mobile number location. This is the simplest way to trace any mobile number location, just send message to specific number and in particular format as given below.

Trick 1 – open your massage and create message “@iTrueCaller<mobile number you want to trace>” and then send to the mobile number 9266592665

Trick 2 – open your massage and create message “#iTrueCaller<mobile number you want to trace>” and then send to the mobile number 5544

Note – SMS charges will apply for this service

Trace Mobile Number exact Location with name [TrueCaller]

If you are using Android phone then you can use world’s largest and most popular mobile phone community named TrueCaller. If you don’t have android device you can also use TrueCaller features from any Laptop, PC, and Tablet etc.

Trace Mobile Number exact Location with name on TrueCaler website

• First you need to logon to TrueCaller website, select your country and put your 10 digit mobile number in the search bar.
• After entering your mobile number, you will have to sign in with facebook / Google/ Microsoft/ Yahoo account to trace the mobile number.
• After Sign in you can trace any mobile number location and owner name

Trace mobile Number Through Truecaller SMS Service

TrueCaller also provide SMS service to trace any mobile number location. For trace any mobile number location just type SMS “Trace < 10 digit mobile number you want to trace> and send to 54444. You wil get reply with Name, Service provider and it’s region.

Ex – If you want to trace location of mobile number 123456789 then just type SMS Trace 123456789 and send to 54444

Note – SMS charges will be apply.

6 apps to obtain LAC & CellID for GSM tracking

In order to determine the location of your cell phone using cell towers, you need to know the LAC (Location Area Code) and CellID of the cell tower your cell phone is currently connected to. Then you can enter the LAC, CellID and other data to locate your handset location, this is how cell tower based locating works. Google Maps and other mobile locating apps use cell tower/base station data to determine the location of cell phone as well.

Although you can always enter test mode/field test to get these data, it’s not suitable for normal users, so we can try some cell phone apps to help us.

Symbian

As the world’s most used mobile OS, Symbian mobile devices are very popular here; I myself own two Symbian Smartphones. As a cell phone to make calls and send SMS, Nokia keyboard cell phone is a great success, that’s why lots of people use Nokia mobile devices.

CellTrack. Cell track is a little app running on Symbian to collect the CellID, LAC, Mobile Country Code/Network Code, signal strength and battery usage data of your mobile device.

Fieldtest. Fieldtest (just Google it) can do what Cell Tracker can do for you, at the same time, it shows available cell towers around, if you find a cell tower of good signal quality, you can lock it and enjoy better cell reception. But keep in mind that you need to unlock when you move to another place, otherwise you may find your handset receives signal.

Viking informatics.  Viking informatics, in fact, a piece of web-based mobile tracking app for Symbian devices (you can set up a server to receive data with supplied files). In the meantime, it can be used to get a variety of data such as IMEI, CellID and LAC etc.

Android

Net Monitor. Net Monitor is based on Android and it can help obtain the name of your carrier, signal type (for example EDGE), CellID, LAC and signal strength.

Cell Finder. Please it’s not cell phone finder, but it does what it means. Cell finder can show the cell tower/base station information your handset is connected to and other neighboring cell towers. It can also acquire the GPS coordinates of your handset location.

Cell Tower Locator. Cell Tower Locator is another Android based app derived from Cell Finder. It shows the MCC, MNC, CellID, LAC and signal strength in dBm. Also GPS information are displayed.

GSM signal monitoring. This app promises neighboring cell towers information. Unfortunately I only see the cell tower my handset is connected to. You can download it here.

There’s many more, search on Google Play for yourself.

iPhone

Well for iPhone OS 4.0 (not included) earlier, you can use the test mode/Field test to get these data. Type *3001#12345#* when it’s standby, you can enter Field test and get the MCC, MNC, CellID and LAC.

iPhone Signal. It’s said that this app was developed by Dev-Team, you can buy from Cydia, and it works on iOS 4 as well. You can get the MCC, MNC, CellID and LAC with this app as well. What’s more, it shows on maps the cell tower you connected to, the available and unavailable cell towers as well, which is interesting as you can see the density of the cell towers. Always remember, you can get more accurate location data with more cell towers. However I have not tried it as I do not own an iPhone.

After you get the Cell ID, LAC, MCC and MNC, try GSM tracking, or create a mobile locating app.

P.S. CellID database for reference (http://www.opencellid.org/, http://cellphonetrackers.org/gsm/gsm-tracker.php).

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• Interesting findings about WCDMA Cell ID
• Handset makers promise to protect our mobile devices
• Can you stay anonymous in the digital world?
• A nontechnical way to find missing iPhone

Finding and Reverse Engineering Deleted SMS Messages

Recovering deleted SMS messages from Android phones is a frequent request I get. Luckily, there are several places and ways to recover these on an Android phone.

In this post, I am going to cover some common locations in the file system to recover deleted text messages.  Additionally, because the SMS structure can vary across Android devices, I am going to show how I deconstructed the SMS message, and then applied the information to SMS messages found in unallocated space.  I am sure there is more than one way to skin this cat, some may even be better; this is just the way I did.

For this example, I used a Samsung GSM SGH-T959V Galaxy S.  Even if you don't do Mobile forensics, the principles of this example can be applied to determine structured data found in unallocated space.


Where the Messages are hiding

When working with cell phones, several types of acquisitions may be taken:  logical, file system and physical.  A logical acquisition is usually the information as the end user sees it.  Text messages, call logs etc.  It does not include deleted data.  A file system acquisition is the next step up. It provides access to the files system, but not unallocated space.  A physical acquisition is a bit by bit copy of the flash memory and thus, includes unallocated space. For more information on these three types of acquisitions, check out this page on Mobile Forensics on Wikipedia.

For recovering deleted text messages a physical extraction is the best.  However, there are several locations in a file system extraction that can yield deleted text messages: the SMS Database, the SMS journal file and a log database.

SMS Database

Text messages are stored in an SQLite database named mmssms.db typically under the location /Root/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/. These SQlite databases retain deleted data. If you are using a program like Cellebrite, it will "automatically" recover deleted text messages from this database. However, I also manually check for fragments using a Hex viewer, or an SQLite Viewer like Oxygen Forensics SQLite Viewer. They offer a 30 day free trial if you want to play around with it. This SQlite Viewer show blocks of deleted data:

SMS Journal File
The mmssms.db-journal file is a roll back journal file written to by the SQLite Database. If this file exists, it will be in the same directory as the mmssms.db file.  It can contain numerous deleted text messages. Since cheeky4n6 monkey helped develop a script to parse this, he has done an excellent write up on the format and structure which I will post a link to once its up.  I won't go into too much detail here, except to say the text messages contain the same structure as in the SMS database.

logs.db
This file appears to be a database that logs various activities on the phone such as calls and SMS messages.  The field holding the SMS messages appears to contain the first 50 or so characters of a text message.  Because it is an SQLite database, you can view deleted data as explained above.

Unallocated Space
Glorious unallocated space - my favorite location to find deleted text messages.  I have found hundreds of deleted text messages here through various keyword searches.  If you are lucky, you can carve a whole mmssms.db SQLite database from unallocated space as explained here by Richard Drinkwater.  This will allow you to open the complete file with an SQLite viewer and view information such as the phone number, date, sent date, status and folder.  If not, this is where leveraging your tools can help you parse this information manually.

Determining the SMS structure

Case Setup:
Let's say a bowl of Trix has been eaten, and you need to determine who did it and when.  A keyword search for "trix" brings you to the following message in unallocated space (phone numbers have been changed for this example):

 As you can see from the example above, the phone number and SMS body are readily apparent.  However, just by looking at the ASCII data on the right, it is not possible to tell if this was a sent or received message. In this case, that is critical information.  If the message was sent, the suspect whose phone you're examining ate the Trix.  If this text message was received from somebody, the sender ate the Trix.  We also need to figure out what the date of the message was.

The steps I use to determine the structure of the SMS are as follows: View the SMS database to see the schema and the format of the data. Do some pattern matching using existing SMS messages and apply the pattern to deleted messages.

First, I use one of my 'all in one' tools to see if it was able to parse the existing messages on the phone. Below is a text message in the existing inbox of the phone (picture from Cellebrite):

By viewing the mmssms.db file in Hex view and locating the text message above, I can begin to see how this data is stored in a raw format. I can see information such as the phone number, body and SMSC (the phone numbers are normally 10 digits long, but messages from T-Mobile come through with a phone number of 456). I know the date information must be hiding in here somewhere:

By viewing the Schema of the mmssms.db SQLite database table that holds the SMS messages and viewing the message within the database, I can gather more information about this message:

Schema 

Message

 By looking at the database, I can see that the date is stored in Epoch, and there are some flags that look like they might correspond to whether the message was sent or received – the fields named “read” and “type”.

By using all of this information, I can begin to figure out the structure.  The order of the fields in the raw data follows the order of the SMS schema. For clarity's sake, I have only included the most common fields in the picture below:

Address:
The Phone number associated with the message.

Date Field
To determine how the date is stored, I viewed this value in the database and noted it was stored in Epoch.  I tried converting the Hex value 01 3C 5D BC 32 76 to decimal which is 1358782280310. This value matches the value in the database. Converting to UTC yields Mon, 21 January 2013 15:31:20 UTC, which matches the value displayed by Cellebrite.

Read/Type
By using my all in one tool, I looked through the existing SMS Messages and cross referenced these values to what I was seeing in the database to establish what the flag values of "read" and "type" mean.
    Read:
        00 = Message was unread
        01 = Message was read
    Type (Aka"folder"): 
        01 = Inbox
        02 = Sent

Now I can apply the same structure to the message found in unallocated space and parse it manually:

 Date: Hex value 01 39 22 20 57 66 to decimal which is 1344897308518. Converting to UTC yields Mon, 13 August 2012 22:35:08 UTC

Type:  02 which means the message Sent.

So now I have some valuable information about this deleted text message. This message was sent by the user of the phone indicating they ate the Trix, and the message was sent on August 13, 2012 at 3:35PM AZ time.

I should also mention that within Cellbrite, you can view an existing message in the mmssms.db file in Hex view.  Cellebrite color blocks data it has parsed, and when you hover over a block, it will show you what values it parsed. I wanted to show the more "manual" way first in case some other tools do not do this, or if for some reason the database was not parsed, which I have ran into. Please note, it does not do this for messages in unallocated space.

  
Depending on the phone, the SMS structure may be totally different. Also, because the information is stored in a SQLite database and deleted fragments may be located outside of an SQLite database, there does not seem to be a "header" or "magic number" to carve for.

Here are three SMS schemas from three different Android Phones. Some different fields of interest have been circled. The same method used above could be used to determine how these values are stored "in the raw" to parse deleted messages found in unallocated space.


Samsung CDMA SPH-D720 Nexus S

Samsung GSM SGH-T839 Sidekick 4G

Samsung GSM SGH-T959V Galaxy S

  
As you can see from the three phones above, each phone has a different way of storing the SMS messages which can make it difficult to write a script to "recover all deleted text messages from all Android phones" -I have left that up to the monkeys - well at least one cheeky one.


Adrian's script is now available, make sure and check it out.

Tracked Lost Mobile Through IMEI

Some of the Few Websites  For Tracing an IMEI no if you losted Your Mobiles....and Report Theft...

http://www.trackimei.com/ReportTheft.aspx

http://www.baza-ukradenih-gsm.com/?language=en

http://imei-number.com/imei-number-lookup/

http://www.numberingplans.com/?page=analysis&sub=imeinr

http://mgismobilesecurity.com/

Lock and Track your Stolen Mobile Hand Set Through IMEI Number

Do you know your mobile’s IMEI number?  Just press * # 0 6 # in your mobile hand set, IMEI number will be displayed in your mobile hand set.

Keep the IMEI number safely at other place. This IMEI number is unique number for each mobile hand set. In case your mobile hand set will get stolen, you can track or unlock your mobile hand set through IMEI number.

First track your mobile through IMIE number here www.trackimei.com and report theft or loss.

If your mobile hand set got stolen, you need to do following things.

1. Submit FIR for your mobile loss, give details of hand set model, color, IMEI number etc.

2. Ask your service provider to track the mobile phone, your mobile phone will be tracked only if the thief are using your mobile hand set with any sim card. If the thief is keeping your mobile switched off, your service provider can not track the mobile hand set location. You should not expect muck cooperation from service provider or police to locate your phone.

3. If you are unable to find your mobile number, insure that at least your mobile handset is locked. The thief can not use (misuse) your mobile with any  sim card. You should ask mobile service provider to lock your mobile through IMEI number.

Anti-theft mobile tracking software

The best way before your phone is stolen or lost is to do something by yourself. There is a lot of software on the internet which allows you to get information about the current MSISDN (phone number) using your phone, location of the phone (if your phone supports GPS or by CELL info), to delete your phonebook remotely, to lock your phone etc…

Here is a list of some anti-theft, tracking, locating software for mobile phones which works on different platforms, some of them are FREE and some are commercial.

Software name	License type
Glympse	FREE
Google Latitude	FREE
BuddyWay	FREE
SmartProtect	FREE
DSMP	FREE
RemoteTracker	FREE
TotalCare	FREE
MobileDefense	FREE
Mologogo	FREE
LocateA	FREE
F-Secure	FREE
mGuard (for SonyEricsson)	FREE
MobiWee	FREE beta
iLocalis for iPhone	FREE and commercial
Guardian	FREE and commercial
Mobile Spy	commercial
FlexiSpy	commercial
MobiStealth	commercial
UMU StopThief	commercial
SpriteTerminator	commercial
Phone Security System	commercial
MobileMe for iPhone	commercial
MobileShield	commercial
SecureMe	commercial
WorldTracker	commercial
TheftNotifier	commercial
Ultimate Theft	commercial
WaveSecure	commercial
Anti-theft	commercial
GadgetTrak	commercial
BAK2u	commercial
B-Secure	commercial
MobileJustice	seems dead project

Did you try and of listed software? Please tell us your expirience by commenting below…
Please do not contact us for tracking mobile phones as we do not have equipment for tracking.