IMPORTANT MESSAGE: PLEASE NOTE THAT AS DATA FROM TRACE IS CURRENTLY BEING INTEGRATED WITH OUR SYSTEMS WE RECOMMEND USERS ALSO RUN A FREE SEARCH ON TRACE (www.trace.com) WHILST THE WORK IS COMPLETED.
CheckMEND the world’s largest due diligence service which is owned by Recipero is delighted to announce the recent acquisitions of two US centric businesses, the Trace due diligence system and PhoneHistoryReport the stolen phone checking service. The data from both businesses will be incorporated into the CheckMEND service over the next few weeks.
Both services will complement the existing CheckMEND service providing millions of new records to the CheckMEND website. Of particular note is that the acquisition of Trace will allow CheckMEND to access stolen property data from over 18,000 US law enforcement agencies vastly expanding their reach in the US market. Adrian Portlock CEO of Recipero commented:
These two acquisitions are strategically very important to us as we look to replicate the huge success of CheckMEND in the UK and Europe in the USA. We are already talking to a range of organisations who wish to use the new enhanced CheckMEND service in the US and we are very excited about the potential opportunities this provides to the US consumer buying and selling on sites such as EBay and Craig’s List.
I reported my Iphone 4 stolen to the Uk police and O2 have just run a check mend to make sure the scum that stole my item cannot profit much from my goods only to find the check mend report has nothing about the item being stolen.
Not only have i wasted £1.99 but far more importantly someone may think the item they are buying are OK if they use this site
Hi Lee,
As your network would (should) have informed you, it takes up to 48 hours for a block to be shared with other networks. With regard to blocking, Recipero are considered another network. You do not say exactly when you reported it blocked but if your reports were contemporary with your comment then we would not expect to know about the block yet. Just as the thief may currently be making calls using a SIM from another network until his chosen network also receives notification of the block from the central black list that O2 would have placed your report on.
With regard to the Police report, we would dearly love to receive police reports in real-time. However, this simply doesn’t happen. It depends on the individual force as to how often they send us their data. Most do it daily or several times per day but many factors can affect this so again there is an inevitable time-lag.
CheckMEND is not intended as a tool to check the speed of the Police or Network’s transmittal of information. If you would like to provide the CheckMEND certificate number in an email to support@checkmend.com and include this reply then our support team will be happy to arrange a refund.
I got ripped off with an iPhone purchase on eBay; worked fine for 10 weeks, then showed no signal bars or no service. Turns out the phone was reported stolen or lost yet checkmend only shows it as barred with no lost/stolen/insurance claims against it. After extensive googling, seems this is the norm in the UK so checkmend is next to useless except if it shows it’s barred, it’s reported lost or stolen even if it doesn’t say so 🙁
Sir, We’re very sorry to hear of your bad experience with your Ebay purchase. However, you say the phone worked for 10 weeks. This means that during those ten weeks it could not have been blocked with the networks. Since network blocking takes only 48 hours to become effective across all UK networks this tells me that the block was not requested until long after you purchased the phone. CheckMEND cannot of course guard against such practices. As you yourself say, CheckMEND does show the phone as blocked and it is indeed blocked so our records are correct.
As our notes explain on the certificate, a current block arises only because the phone has been reported lost or stolen to a network, a point you also make.
We do not classify this as “Stolen” unless there is a corroborating Police crime report. Without that, all we have to go on is the network’s record that does not differentiate between lost and stolen but merely says “lost or stolen”.
Had there been a crime report, we would also show the phone as stolen. Clearly this is all moot though since the phone was not reported as blocked until long after your purchase, CheckMEND could not possibly have protected you from this. No-one could have guessed that the original owner of your phone would report it “lost or stolen” to their network weeks after you purchased it.
If you would like to send the IMEI number to support@checkmend.com and quote reference BLOG110314 we will happily check the phone’s history and provide a free CheckMEND certificate AND we will provide an unambiguous statement of facts that we know about the phone in order to provide support to any dispute resolution that you may want to pursue with Ebay or Paypal.
I bought a Nokia N8 back in March and having put the IMEI though CheckMEND this week I have found out that it has been blocked by a network and is currently blocked by one or more networks. Everything else on the report comes up clear. This explains why I couldn’t make or receive calls on it with 2 different SIM cards. I’ve contacted the seller to se if I can find out any history. I was told that it was on Virgin so should I contact them to see if it can be unblocked?
Dave, thanks for the comment. Normally the only person that is able to unblock a phone with a network in the UK is the person that held the phone on contract with the network in question. From what you have described it will be the person that sold it to you (assuming they were the rightful owner) that will have to contact the network to effect the unblock. For more information and support please contact the CheckMEND support team via http://support.checkmend.com