Category Archives: Police

CheckMEND, CheckMEND USA, Crime, Police

The Serial Entrepreneur

4 Comments

For those of you who have heard about it, but wondered what CheckMEND is and how it came about I thought I would give you the low down on why and how it all began.

Me, founder of CheckMEND.com

Lost my phone!

In 2000 I lost my phone on the London Underground and went to the lost property office to try to find it. However, I was then faced with the task of providing a serial number or what we also know as the IMEI number. But in 2000 no one had really heard of what an IMEI number was let alone know their own!

Anyway after eventually finding my IMEI number and recovering my phone, I realised that all modern consumer electronic products have a unique serial number and that without them there was little way of distinguishing one item from another. Thus, I formed the idea that there was a need in the market for a pre-loss or theft registration service containing these serial numbers.

Previous career path

My career has always involved providing services to the consumer, back in 2000, at the age of 40; I sold my chain of restaurants, bars and leisure facilities, with the aim of taking early retirement and relaxing after a very full working life… until the idea for CheckMEND hit me.

I decided to start up a company called Recipero (latin meaning to retain or recover), with a view to building a company that provided a range of products and services based on the accumulation, organisation and analysis of information relating to personal property ownership, associated criminality, fraud and illegal trading.

The simple pre-loss registration database:

The starting point was with a simple pre-loss registration database, but it quickly became apparent that there was value in the analysis of the data and potential to provide HPI-type data for consumer electronics. This was reinforced at the time with the explosion of online auction sites and the willingness of people to buy and sell second-hand goods online. All at the same time as the huge increase in the theft of mobile phones and other mobile devices such as laptops, ipods and the like.
The next three years was spent populating the MEND data warehouse and building partnerships across the mobile industry, with the likes of Carphone Warehouse and mobile phone networks. The police forces were also a vital partner for me.
Eventually, the system grew and now contains billions of pieces of discrete information and is accessed over a million times a month by the mobile phone industry, all UK Police forces, major insurers, the second hand trade, recyclers and the public.
CheckMEND.com was launched in 2006 and the CheckMEND database is now used extensively by second hand trade and the public the most common use of CheckMEND by the general public is for when they are buying or selling items from online auction sites like ebay.

Taking it international:

I can now safely say the company is well established and we are starting to focus on business outside the UK. 2008 will see two new launches for CheckMEND.com. One in the US, which the Recipero and CheckMEND teams are extremely excited about, with the U.S. being the largest market for consumer electronics. Not only that, we have already begun the process of launching in Asia too.

Obviously the road to where we are today didn’t all run as smoothly as suggested above, many a challenge was faced and problem overcome, but this is the CheckMEND story… so far…

Have a look at the youtube video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zcm9VFNvuQ

Lost Property, Police, Report My Loss

Medication returned thanks to reportMyloss.com

On the 10th April a member of the public reported she had left her bag containing a range of personal items including some important medication on the roof of her car.

Within 24 hours the bag was handed in and a simple search of her name from one of the cards in the bag found her report in seconds and she was quickly contacted and the bag returned intact. Another great result for reportMyloss.com

Lost Property, Police, Report My Loss

First Success for reportMyloss.com – Less than a week after going live!

Nicola Spencer of Street lost her mobile and reported it to Avon and Somerset Police via Reportmyloss.com. A few days later the phone was handed into Street Police Station and the staff member who received the handset, Liz Tredwell, decided to run a check on the site to see if it had been reported,

I have read about reportmyloss.com said Liz and thought I would run a check on the phone even though the only details I had were the make, color and place it was found. It was only trial and error, but I was amazed to see that someone had lost a similar phone nearby. I thought it might be hers so I rang her and asked her to come down to the station to identify it. She was able to identify it by the photographs which is wonderful for her.

Nicola Spencer was naturally delighted to have her phone back;

I never thought I would see it again and now it’s turned up. The most upsetting thing about losing it was the photographs and personal stuff on the phone. I am really impressed with reportmyloss.com and will tell my friends about it. Thank you.

reportMyloss.com is so powerful it is able to match any searched field of information meaning the chances of matching lost and found reports is greatly increased as shown in this first case of recovery.