Thieves are cashing in on recycling phones. For several years there have be these machines were you can recycle your phone for cash. Recently there have been reports of the rise in car break-ins because of the recycling machines. The original owners of the phone have no way of recovering their phone after thieves have broken into their car and stole them. I propose a solution to reprogram these machines to make the owner of the phone verify ownership. Since the machine can read the phone and the condition of the phone, there should be away to verify ownership. A password or the last 4-digts of the person’s social security number could be used to verify ownership. First, a program must be written to prompt the machine to verify the ownership of phone by either entering a password or the last 4-digits of the owner’s social security number. Then the program has to be tested. Any glitches in the program must be worked out before test it on the public. Once the entire program is good to go, now it must be tested on the public.
After testing the machine for about a month, it’s time to analysis how effective the machine is at being able to verify ownership of the phone. We should also be able to track how many times someone couldn’t verify ownership and look to see if there is a way to give the original owner their phone.
Lafevers, D. (2012, January). Recycle cell phones for cash in reverse vending machine. Retrieved from http://gajitz.com/recycle-cell-phone-for-cash-in-reverse-vending machine
Murielle. (2009, October 17). Cash in your old cell phones at ecoatm machine. Retrieved from http://www.greenfudge.com/2009/10/17/cash-in-your-cell-phones-at-ecoatm-machine