Acoording to a report by Reuters, Apple’s generous customer service may be causing huge problems for victims of iPhone theft. The warranty plan is tied to the iPhone and not the person who owns the phone; this means anyone can take an iPhone to an Apple Store for service or replacement.

The ease of trading in stolen iPhones and selling their replacements makes them nearly as tempting as grabbing cash. In cities from coast-to-coast, reports of iPhone thefts are common. While some thieves sell the phones through the traditional channels of fencing stolen goods, examples abound of stolen iPhones being brought back to Apple, as if broken, for either replacement or a discount on a new unit. ”Apple seems to have not considered stolen devices and instead is relying on the honor system,” says Robert Siciliano, a consultant for Intel Corp’s technology security unit McAfee and an identity theft expert. “The honor system is devised with the mindset that we are all sheep and there are no wolves.” Siciliano says he has known of this problem for a while, but doesn’t see any immediate solution. “Until consumers scream loud enough about this issue, Apple probably won’t do anything about it.”

Apple has yet to comment on the findings within the report but let’s hope a simple solution can be found that will not cause pain for the honest amongst us. The last thing we need is for Apple to change its policies and make life more difficult when it comes to iPhone service and replacement.

Source: Reuters, Image Wikipedia

Trying to figure out where to find the UDID or serial number of your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone? There are many reasons you may need to look up your UDID, IMEI, or serial number of your iOS device. While earlier generations had the serial printed on the back casing of the device, many newer models don’t. There are still several ways you can obtain this information both natively on your device or via iTunes.

Follow along to find out how.

As a side note, a lot of information is taken out for privacy reasons. Obviously your fields will not be empty.

Serial Numbers

There are a few ways to obtain serial numbers. The most common in under Settings.

1. Tap Settings and go into General.
2. Now click About.
3. When you scroll down you’ll see quite a bit of device information including your serial number. (As a side note, users on 4.x will not see the UDID/ICCID number on your device like in the picture above. I believe this is a new feature in iOS 5.

If your iOS device will not boot and it has a SIM tray, you can also pull out the SIM tray and view the serial printed on it. As long as your SIM tray has not been mixed up with anyone else’s, it should be the correct serial number.

UDID numbers

To view your UDID number in iTunes, use the following steps –

1. Open iTunes with your device plugged in and you will see your device name and information. Tap where your phone number is a couple times and it will eventually show your UDID number (also known as ICCID). This is the number you have to have on file to test developer builds of iOS.

2. If you need to paste this number somewhere, simply go to the top of iTunes and click Edit and then Copy. This will paste your UDID number to the clipboard. From there you can easily copy it into an e-mail or text document.

To view your UDID number from on your device, use the following steps –

1. Download a UDID app from the App Store. There are several available and most are free. I use UDID by Sean White (Free – iTunes Link)
2. Simply open the program and it will give you all of your device information.

3. You can then copy it into an e-mail or just view it.

Viewing device information from programs like UDID are especially convenient if you aren’t home to plug into iTunes and need to access the information quickly.

But what if your device is stuck in restore mode and you can’t load this information in iTunes or on the device?

You can still pull the information if you have a previous backup file as the backups are saved as “UDID – Date”.

Simply navigate to the following location and view your UDID as the name of your backup –

Backup locations in Windows

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Backup locations in Mac OS X

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Have you used any of these methods or a different one? How’d they work for you?

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

A company by the name of Negri Electronics (among others) is offering a remote unlock for any iPhone model using the device’s IMEI number — the cost is a cool $175. They claim the unlock won’t be affected by future software updates and back the service with a 100% money back guarantee.

This is the FIRST remote unlocking service for the iPhone. Any model, any carrier, any firmware, any baseband and a permanent unlock. YOUR PHONE WILL NOT RE-LOCK, EVER. This service is guaranteed. Simply send us your IMEI and within 24 hours yourself a permanently unlocked iPhone.

The way an official SIM-unlock from Apple works is that the iPhone’s IMEI number is registered with Apple’s activation servers so that, when the iPhone is connected to iTunes, it’s recognized as unlocked, activated, and left open regardless of which SIM in subsequently inserted in the device.

Negri is not Apple or an official iPhone carrier, so there should be a big yellow sticky placed on it saying “buyer beware”.

Even officially unlocked iPhones sometimes experience problems or need to be reset by Apple, which requires time on the phone with Apple support or a trip to the Apple Store. Needless to say, they won’t help you at all with an unofficially unlocked phone.

So is this remote unlock worth dropping $175 on? Let us know what you think in the comments!

UPDATE: @CellUnlocknet on Twitter let us know they’re not offering this service because, as mentioned above, Apple could discover the IMEI numbers unlocked through this process and relock them. So once again, make a well informed decision any time you spend a good chunk of cash on the internet.

Got a video camera with a nightvision (infrared) setting? Grab your iPhone and take a look at the left-rear of the phone, as fskj85 of Austrialian Whirlpool did, and you’ll see the snazzy “Data Matrix Code” underneath the body of the device. Wazzat, you ask? It’s essentially a two-dimensional bar code (many Nokia phones are able to photograph these to get links to downloads, for example). Apparently the plastic in that section is transparent to infrared light, allowing you to see the matrix underneath. That’s some secret-agent-design right there, folks, somebody nominate Jonathan Ives as the next James Bond.

Engadget Mobile, where we first saw the story, posits that the matrix likely encodes the IMEI and the Serial for the iPhone. That information is also printed in human-readable form on the SIM-card tray, but since that tray could technically be removed / swapped into another iPhone, it makes sense that Apple would find a way to get that data onto the iPhone itself.

That, or Apple is secretly tracking us with every camera we pass by.