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So,

Yesterday I lost my Samsung A6+. The guy/girl who picked must have already shut it down.

It is encrypted and it had a locking pattern each time I needed to use it.

  • If the guy does a factory reset(the one went turning on the phone), will he be able to do so, and use it as a brand new?

  • The documents I had in the SD Card are cloud safe, so no worries about losing it. However, do you know if the encryption also goes to the SD card level?

I really doubt that even going to the police to alert them I've lost it, would do anything useful in order to have a minor chance to retrieve it if it is one day reconnected to the network, so do you think I should do it either way?

Thanks all!

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  • Was the external SD in the phone was portable or adopted storage?
    – beeshyams
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 14:24
  • Not sure I fully understood, but it's those micro sd cards... Nothing serious, so to say.
    – Nuno Silva
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 15:07
  • No, what i meant was that when you insert the SD card, device asks you whether you want the SD to be "portable" or "adoptable". That makes a difference or did you use a third party tool to encrypt?
    – beeshyams
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 15:09
  • Then I don't know that answer, tbh... :/
    – Nuno Silva
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 15:47
  • In that case - he can't use your phone because it is screen locked, let's say he guesses right and does factory reset, he won't be able to use it because of "Factory Reset Protection". To bypass that isn't easy, so with the phone, they can sell it for spares. If your card was used as adoptable-storage then they can't access your data on SD card
    – beeshyams
    Commented Dec 18, 2018 at 16:19

1 Answer 1

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3

TBH the answer is 'Yes' he can use it after factory reset.

As we know that it is needed for an android device to re-login from the same account as it was previously logged in before doing a factory reset or called it as owner's account, but one can still use other account to log in and set up a fresh android after resetting the device.

However, Google always providing patches to these vulnerabilities but it is not enough as of now. There are various guides to bypass FRP.

Coming to your data on SD card. If it is encrypted no need to worry about data.

It may help you, read here more about 'Adoptable storage' and 'Portable storage'.

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