The 60-second journey
What actually happens
the moment your phone is stolen.
Sankofa doesn't live on your phone. It lives inside the carrier network — which is why it still works after a thief yanks the SIM, factory resets the device, or tosses it into airplane mode. Here is the exact sequence, end to end.
- 01
7:00 PM — the snatch
Kemi is crossing Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos. A boy on a bike grabs her phone and disappears into traffic. She has no phone to call anyone with, no way to open her banking app, no way to track the device. This is the moment every existing tool stops working.
- 02
The network notices before Kemi does
CAMARA · SIM Swap
Within seconds of the thief popping out Kemi's SIM, her carrier logs a SIM-swap event. Sankofa is listening at the network layer, so the signal reaches us before the phone even leaves the bridge. No app needs to be open. Nothing needs to have Wi-Fi.
- 03
We verify the signal is real
CAMARA · SIM Swap + Device Swap
False alarms kill trust. Sankofa immediately asks the network to independently confirm the swap, and checks whether the physical device was also swapped. If either returns false, the score is gentler. If both say yes, we know the trigger is genuine.
- 04
We follow the phone, not the SIM
IMEI binding · survives every SIM change
A SIM is just a subscriber card — pop it out and it's inert. The phone itself has a permanent hardware ID, the IMEI, that it broadcasts to every cell tower it attaches to, regardless of which SIM is inside. The moment the thief drops their own SIM into Kemi's phone, the carrier's register sees Kemi's IMEI paired with a brand-new number. Sankofa asks the network which line is currently bound to that IMEI, and pivots tracking onto it. The thief can swap SIMs a hundred times — the IMEI keeps ratting them out. This is the layer Find My iPhone can't reach.
- 05
Where is the phone right now?
CAMARA · Location Retrieval + Reachability
We pull live location directly from the cell network — no GPS, no device cooperation needed — and check whether the old device is still reachable. A phone that's gone completely dark seconds after a swap is behaving exactly like a stolen phone.
- 06
Is this actually theft, or is Kemi upgrading?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 · Explainable scoring
A naive rule engine would freeze every SIM swap. Sankofa's AI agent weighs distance from home, time of day, reachability, swap verification, recent activity, and whether a partner retailer pinged a sale-initiated webhook. It returns an explainable confidence score — the reason, in plain English, shows on the dashboard.
- 07
Freeze the money before the thief moves it
Partner webhook · Mobile money freeze
If the score crosses into HIGH, Sankofa calls the mobile-money provider directly — Opay, M-Pesa, MTN MoMo — and freezes Kemi's wallet. The thief can hold the phone, but they can't spend a naira. This happens in under a second, faster than a human could ever react.
- 08
Tell Kemi and the people who can help her
Resend · Owner + trusted contact
Kemi doesn't have her phone — so we email her. From any borrowed device, an internet cafe, a family member's laptop, she can open the email and see exactly what happened, where her phone was last, and confirm it was her if it wasn't theft. Her trusted contact gets a separate email in case she needs to call from an unknown number.
- 09
Turn the phone into a brick
IMEI registry · Cross-carrier blacklist
The IMEI is blacklisted across every participating carrier in the region. The thief can swap SIMs a hundred times — no network will let the device on. When a phone can't connect to anyone, it can't be resold, which is the whole reason it was stolen. Kill the resale market and you kill the motive.
The happy path
Or: it wasn't theft at all
One-click undo in the email
Every alert Sankofa sends ends with a one-click "This was me — undo" button. If Kemi just got a new SIM, bought a new phone, or traveled overseas, she opens the email from any device — her laptop, her sister's phone, a cafe computer — and taps undo. The wallet unfreezes, the event resolves, the IMEI comes off the blacklist. The whole loop stays under her control, without anyone at her carrier or bank needing to be awake.
Why this works
A phone the network has disowned is worth nothing to anyone.
Find My iPhone and Google Find My Device both assume the thief doesn't know about the factory-reset button. Every thief does. Sankofa works at the telecom layer — the one layer a thief cannot bypass with a button — so the phone stays tied to Kemi's identity across every SIM, every reset, every owner.
Kill the resale market, and you kill the motivation to steal.