My lessons learned from recent lost/found phone episode:
Last weekend we were visiting Disney and took a rare trip to Islands of Adventure as we'd not yet ridden the Harry Potter ride. I must have been under a spell, because DH and I each decided we MUST have a wand. Universal was doing a promotion, giving you back a $10 gift card with a $50 purchase, so we bought them.
Upon exiting the park, we were at their large Outpost shop and I put my purse and phone down on the flat surface of a stamp-vending machine to dig out the gift card. Somehow, I walked away from my phone, paid for my loot, then walked as far as Margaritaville (200 yards?) before I realized I no longer had my phone. It couldn't have been five minutes. I raced back, impatiently waited on the line to get back into Islands of Adventure, then immediately went back to the stamp vending machine. The phone was gone. As it was only steps to the cash register, I figured anyone who was going to return it would have just stepped over and handed it to a cashier. No one at the cashier's desk had it, and a sympathetic manager walked me over to lost and found. Nothing there-just got a card with a number to keep calling to check to see if it had been found.
This is just a Motorola Droid X2, so nothing like the financial loss of the OP, but the loss to me was way more than the cost of the phone. I have my ebay account,
amazon account, and chase account apps on the phone. They are password protected, but STILL...now here's the rub. I have no way to get to the number for Verizon to ask for my service to be suspended because DH's battery is dead. I end up having to ask a bartender in Jimmy Buffettland to help me find the phone number. Since no one has phone books anymore, he has to go inside Margaritaville to get a manager to look it up online. Ten minutes later, he comes back with the number (nice guy!) and then lets me use HIS phone (REALLY nice guy!) to call Verizon. After a tussle with their automated system, I finally get the service suspended. Relieved, now all I was struggling with was the loss of the information I relied on my phone to store, such as the phone number of our dogsitter, the kids' phones, etc. The dogsitter was only an issue because I always call when we are on our way home so she knows when she can leave the house. She won't leave if I don't call, and we were going to be really late flying back into a snowstorm in Denver. I didn't want to inconvenience her or make her worry.
My sisters join us at Margaritaville for dinner, then I go back to I of A lost and found once more...no phone. I figured its gone, gone, gone. Get back to Old Key West and fire up my Netbook to make sure during the time the phone was missing and before I could suspend the service no one was buying TVs on Amazon. Nothing was touched, and no calls show as being made on my Verizon account. A couple hours later, my ex husband Facebook messages me that some lady called from Florida saying her son had found my phone, and that it was turned in at Universal. What's weird is I hadn't talked to him recently, so his number wasn't in my recent call log, and he's buried in about the middle of my long contact list. I have my current husband set up as the ICE right at the top of the phone, but he wasn't called until much later, when this honest lady left a voice mail that said her young son had picked up the phone and was walking around playing with it for a while before she realized he had it. When she did realize, it, she turned it in wherever she was at the park, so it took until closing time to make its way to Lost and Found. DH also had a voice mail from Universal saying they had the phone!
The following morning on the way to the airport home, I picked it up and gave it a kiss.
What I learned
1) Make sure DH's phone is charged (he forgets)
2) Keep important phone numbers (like the dogsitter) stored in both phones and at least one other place
3) Have the Verizon/Chase phone numbers written down on a card or something in my wallet in case I need to use someone else's phone to suspend accounts
4) Good Samaritans may call ex-husbands!
I'm sorry the OP didn't have a happier ending...I was really lucky.
Bill
this just makes me sad that the place I feel so happy at would take that type of stance on something as fraud and identity theft from their own employees. 
