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Help i need my brothers phone unlocked he died

K

katilayton

Lurker
Hi, my name is Kati. My brother has/had the android samsung replenish with sprint. He went "missing" for 24 days July 6th and was found dead, in his car from a self inflicted gunshot wound to his head on July 31. He left no note, just the belongings he had on him along with his android that has a keypad lock on it instead of the draw pattern. My dad and I have held on to his phone and kept it turned on since. We have probably tried over 1000 password/number combinations we could think of to try to get in and see if there were any text messages, notes, ANYTHING that could help us understand why he would kill himself. We have not taken his phone to get unlocked because we know it will clear out his entire phone and that would defeat the purpose, see what i am saying? Is there anyway we can send the phone in with a copy of his death certificate or ANYTHING you can do to help us break it open without clearing anything? someone please help me.
 
katilayton said:
Hi, my name is Kati. My brother has/had the android samsung replenish with sprint. He went "missing" for 24 days July 6th and was found dead, in his car from a self inflicted gunshot wound to his head on July 31. He left no note, just the belongings he had on him along with his android that has a keypad lock on it instead of the draw pattern. My dad and I have held on to his phone and kept it turned on since. We have probably tried over 1000 password/number combinations we could think of to try to get in and see if there were any text messages, notes, ANYTHING that could help us understand why he would kill himself. We have not taken his phone to get unlocked because we know it will clear out his entire phone and that would defeat the purpose, see what i am saying? Is there anyway we can send the phone in with a copy of his death certificate or ANYTHING you can do to help us break it open without clearing anything? someone please help me.
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I'm so very sorry to hear about your brother. What a terrible thing to have to deal with.

I think you will probably need the assistance of law enforcement or a lawyer to get Sprint to talk to you officially regarding any possible ways to accomplish what you want to do, as most people are going to be scared of privacy violations. A similar issue has come up with regard to email providers releasing passwords to allow family members to access a deceased person's email, and some have wound up in courts.

The only thing I can think of would be to approach it from the standpoint of needing to access the phone to ensure that a crime wasn't committed (i.e, that his death was indeed a suicide rather than a murder), which could conceivably give the police a reason to gain access to the phone's stored information.
 
If you are still needing to unlock the phone, you might want to look into a forensics distribution of linux. I have not tried it, but the theory sounds good in my head (as does flying pigs because then a ton of hot girls from high school owe me sex). Anyways, you could look into Backtrack (BackTrack Linux - Penetration Testing Distribution) or <dead link removed>. Both are forensics/pen test distributions of linux that have the ability to clear passwords in both Windows and Linux environments. Seeing how Android is (from my understanding) Unix based in a way, it might work. But you would have to do some research on it. It would take some time but it's not like you need to learn every program offered in those flavors of Linux. Just figure out the ones that could work for the situation and research those. Just my two cents. Best of luck.
 
Hi Kati
I know this is an old thread, but really hope you get this message.
Wondering how you ended up with unlocking your brothers Samsung phone?
I horribly find myself in an almost identical position... my brother has just taken his own life and all I have is his Samsung phone as a way of contacting his friends (no facebook and his laptop was immeasurably damaged in the incident and needed to be destroyed). The phone is it!
His funeral is in a few days time and I'm desperately trying to contact one of his friends in particular. Have tried everything to find them but with no luck. I'm sure the phone has the contact details.
Would appreciate any guidance you have.
Thanks
LW
 
I'm sorry, but unless you know your brother's screen lock PIN/password/pattern you are out of luck. If you know his GMail ID and password you could retrieve stuff from his Google account (if he syncs stuff with Google). But if you don't know these things we can't help.

These things are supposed to protect your information from thieves, so if there was a way you could do this without any of his passwords then a thief could do the same to unlock any phone they stole, which would make the lockscreens pointless. So they don't provide a back door to let you do this, and when bugs are found that make it possible they patch them. Unfortunately this means that if your brother did not provide you with a way of unlocking (for example, my wife knows how to unlock my phone) then your only real hope is to guess what password or PIN he might have chosen.

Perhaps Google might be able to help with account access if you can prove your identity and his, but I wouldn't hold out much hope - they aren't an amazingly responsive company generally.
 
Just to clarify, be aware there's a difference between being able to access your brother's Google account and being able to bypass his phone's lock screen. As @Hadron already referred to, bypassing the lock screen isn't a simple task. Despite some anonymous web site comments and dubious claims that '...I know someone who just downloaded some app that can hack past any lock screen in just a few minutes..', here in the real world it's not that easy. If he used a simple password/passcode than yes, it might be possible to get past the lock screen, but otherwise just using a brute force method could take years to actually be successful. And depending the phone model and which version of Android it's running, too many consecutive failed attempts will completely lock the phone down, or do a Factory Reset, wiping his user account off of his phone. Also, depending on if he set up is phone to automatically backup and sync his phone data into his online Google account and/or other online services, there could be his personal data that is only stored in his phone. Bypassing a phone lock screen isn't as easy as what you might see in a movie or TV show. There are any number of law enforcement agencies and governments that would just use those same fictional 'hacks' if they were so readily accessible. Instead, a lot of tax dollars get spent trying to bypass lock screens on phones that different agencies obtain in efforts to find clues and evidence:
www.techdirt.com

Judge Tosses Evidence After Government Took More Than Three Years To Crack A Suspect’s Phone

A robbery/kidnapping case allegedly implicating business owner and immigrant Evgeni Kopankov has resulted in the government losing the evidence it took it oh so long to obtain. And the government h…
www.techdirt.com www.techdirt.com

So there are a lot of variables involved to take into consideration. I'll suggest you don't waste too much time, effort, nor money into trying to 'hack' past his lock screen. Especially is he used a biometric lock (i.e. fingerprint or face recognition). If a text-based lock (i.e. password or passcode) and he might have written it down somewhere than maybe, but unlikely to happen.
 
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