Cell Phone Lost in North Myrtle Beach SC, Found and Returned

On Wednesday, Sept 26^th, I was out doing a little metal detecting on my own and not finding a whole lot. I suddenly got a solid signal with a VDI of 32 on my Equinox 800. Pretty sure I had found a cell phone, I carefully dug a big hole so I wouldn’t damage the phone. Sure enough, I found a Samsung Galaxy S8 about 4 to 5 inches deep in the wet sand. It wasn’t damaged, but it wasn’t powering up either. So, the phone either had a dead battery or was shot from being submerged.

When I got home I pulled the case off and cleaned it up. Not knowing how long it’d been in the sand, I didn’t want to plug it in and set it aside to dry out. In the meantime, I contacted an acquaintance at Verizon and gave him the IMEI number off the back of the phone. With that number, he can look it up and be able to see if the phone belongs to a Verizon customer. If he has a match, he’ll contact the owner and have them call me. I got lucky with this one. I hate not being able to find the phone’s owner, 1-I have no use for somebody else’s phone, and 2-I’m sure the owner has pictures or other information they don’t want to lose.

It was a week before Eric, from Maryland, contacted me about his phone, I had actually forgotten about it. I told him that I had taken his phone to Verizon and we weren’t able to power it up or charge it. However, we were able to get his SIM card out of the phone and we taped it to the front of the phone. He said he had a large number of contacts on the phone that he hadn’t backed up to the Cloud so he was very grateful his phone was found. I got his address and sent his phone home.

Jim