Lost iPhone On Holiday

[Futhark]

My daughter is in Portugal and has lost her iPhone 6S which is password protected and setup correctly to iCloud thankfully. Her mother has turned off 3G and/or Data Roaming to prevent running up a large bill from that device and from my understanding my daughter had also put the phone into aeroplane mode as worried she would still run me up a bill playing her games.

I immediately logged into iCloud and put her device into Lost Mode but I assumed this would only kick in once the device had either 3G Connection or Wifi (Which it won't have either) so I contacted Apple to ask about this, they told me the device even without 3G or Wifi will show my lost mode message and telephone number and have the phone at the Hello Screen where it prompts you to connect to wifi which would then allow the device to be tracked but I can't get my head around how this could possibly happen?

Can anyone confirm if this information he gave me today is correct which will give me a little hope of maybe getting the phone returned or is it looking bad for us?

Many Thanks in Advance

 

[MattXDA]

Lost Mode will only work when the phone has an internet connection, I just tried.

 

[Futhark]

Lost Mode will only work when the phone has an internet connection, I just tried.

That's what I thought and I kept saying that to him, how can that information be passed to the phone without either a cellular or wifi connection to say it's putting it in Lost Mode?

So would I be right in saying the only chance I'll have here is when someone goes to reset the phone and it then asks to connect to a wifi network then the Lost Mode will kick in?

 

[MattXDA]

I don't know the context of what he said but maybe he meant that Lost Mode will still work without wifi once it's been initially activated.

Yeah if someone has found the phone and wants to wipe it then once they've put the wifi password in then it should turn on. If they don't put the phone in DFU mode first though then the phone will just ask for the iCloud password in iTunes before it can restore so you'd have to hope they knew or Googled how to get it to restore

 

[SuperKerem]

That's what I thought and I kept saying that to him, how can that information be passed to the phone without either a cellular or wifi connection to say it's putting it in Lost Mode?

So would I be right in saying the only chance I'll have here is when someone goes to reset the phone and it then asks to connect to a wifi network then the Lost Mode will kick in?

Once the phone is reset you will NOT be able to track it or put it in Lost Mode, regardless of whether the phone is connected to the Internet or not.

If Find My iPhone was enabled, the phone will be stuck at the setup screen and will not be able to activate unless the correct Apple ID info is entered in, but as I mentioned above, you cannot track it or put it in Lost Mode.