Avast Anti-Theft is a free app designed for Android smart phones and tablets. It’s main purpose is to help you locate your lost or stolen mobile device, allowing you to track it on a map and control it remotely. You recover your phone by controlling it remotely with SMS commands or via the internet by logging in to your My Avast account.

If your phone is lost or stolen, here are some things you can control remotely:

1. 1. Locate your device on a map – Whether you misplaced your phone, left on the bus, or a thief grabbed it and ran, the GPS on your phone can be enabled so you can receive continuous GPS location updates.

Avast Anti-Theft user Ducky Boy wrote about his experience finding his phone that he dropped on the highway while riding his motorcycle using the GPS feature. Read about it in On the road with avast! Mobile Security.

1. 2. SIM card change notification – Thieves usually change the SIM card after stealing a phone. Anti-Theft recognizes when this happens and notifies you of the new number and geo-location so you can maintain contact with your phone.

Partier and Avast user Andreas lost his phone during a particularly fun party. The next morning he remembered he had installed Avast Anti-Theft. Here’s how he got his phone back, Don’t be sorry for party rocking – install Avast Anti-Theft!

1. 3. Activate the remote siren – Scare the wits out of the thief by activating an extremely loud siren with an SMS command. We guarantee that everyone will hear it. When the thief tries to turn it down, it goes to maximum volume.

Our Avast Communications team decided to try out the siren just to see how loud it really got. Believe me, it was loud. And annoying. We quickly learned How to turn off Avast Mobile Security’s Anti-Theft Siren.

4. 4. Call/SMS forwarding – We took a page from the spy handbook with this feature! You can instruct your phone to call you, with screen blacked out, so you can silently listen in on the thief and obtain details of calls made and received as well as copies of text messages.

5. 5. Remote Memory Wipe – If all hope is gone, you can still protect your privacy by remotely triggering a full, permanent wipe of all phone data (contacts, call log, text messages, browser history, apps, email accounts), including reliable, physical wipe of memory cards (limited functionality on older versions).

This step is super important even if you didn’t lose your phone. We did an experiment where we bought 20 used phones from eBay and found all kinds of personal stuff including nude photos, private messages, even financial documents! Here are the details about what we found, Tens of thousands of Americans sell themselves online every day

Prepare yourself before disaster strikes

Hopefully, you will never need to use Avast Anti-Theft, but it’s best to be prepared just in case something bad happens. You can install Avast Anti-Theft for free from the Google Play Store along with Avast Mobile Security.

Now that you have Avast Anti-Theft  on your phone, there are a few things you need to set up. Learn what you need to do here, How to set up your smartphone for remote control.