> 1. The Emergency card (the first user was contacted when the user's father's iphone was stolen).

Yet the father was the one being fished.

> 2. You can read the phone number off the sim card

How?

> 3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.

Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

>Yet the father was the one being fished.

Not sure I understand. The father's phone was stolen, and the son was contacted, and the son logged into the account.

>How?

Anyone can pop out the sim card and plug it into any dumbphone, navigate to settings and read the phone number. I assume there's probably a USB device to dump data on a sim card.

>Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone is lost until you attain the information that it was stolen. I fail to find it now, but there was a tiktok of a woman who lost their iphone at festival and it turned up in china where she also was unsuccessfully phished.

> Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone could disappear and you would assume it fell out of your pocket or that you left it somewhere, when in fact someone could have stolen it from you while you were not paying attention.

And besides, most people probably don’t expect that a thief would respond and trick them into unlocking the phone for them. Instead the expectation might be that a thief would not respond, and that if someone responded they are a good samaritan trying to help you.