Identify Garmin's Owner. Person is dead :(

Hello!

First of all excuse me, some details may be a bit too personal and explicit.

The story and the problem:
In Ukraine, during the war on the battlefield a soldier was found (about 1 year after his death).

The only "identifiable" thing with him - was a garmin Fenix 6 Pro (SN 3362034190)

with him, and no other possible ID's.... no phone - nothing.....

We want to find relatives so they can have "killed in action" status for his son(brother or whatever) and some benefits with this status (of course nothing can replace human)

current status is "missing in action" and it gives nothing to his family. We want they can bury his relative with honor and just to know the truth.

The watch has no activities or records on it.

We(Me and some friends) tried to:

- add wifi to soldier's watch

- do some special activity on 2 watches (one is ours),

- create special segment on Strava

- We hoped for 2 users appear on the segment participants list (no success)

We tried to see emergency contacts - but it's empty.

It has only "settings.fit" with some info - 80kg weight 2m height and 1997 as a birth year

Few watchfaces and data fields in the APPS folder.

Local dealers says "bought somewhere else" and repair services (official and non officials) don't have any info for Serial Number.

I contacted Garmin also,

Maybe relatives still have access to his relative's e-mailbox - so Garmin can send email to owner's box, give my contacts to them, if they want to contact - they surely will do.

Any ideas more ????

PS: I even tried sniff wifi traffic - of corse TLS encrypted and no user_id cookie inside request...

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0 Bylo Selhi over 1 year ago

First, thank you for doing this.

At this point I would push Garmin hard for any information they may have about this smartwatch. They may have contact information if the owner ever contacted them for support. They may be able to at least tell you where the watch was sold so you can try to trace the owner through them.

Hopefully you will be able to find the relatives of this fallen soldier and be able to give them some comfort.

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago in reply to Bylo Selhi

Yep, fingers crossed! All hopes now are on Garmin guys.

And really big thanx for the guy who actually found this soldier and made a post in local Garmin FB group, where I saw it initially:

0 Data over 1 year ago

Thank you for doing this. Hopefully Garmin can be helpful here. I wish I could be of help, but I think you did all you could.

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago in reply to Data

thanx, man

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago

Garmin replied - no way to retrieve personal info because its personal...

0 Bylo Selhi over 1 year ago in reply to Evgeniy P.

Evgeniy P. said:
Garmin replied - no way to retrieve personal info because its personal...

That's disappointing. Under the circumstances perhaps Garmin would be willing to release this info to government authorities so that they can try to locate relatives. Do you have contacts in the the UA military or police who could contact Garmin?

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago in reply to Bylo Selhi

yep, it seems the only way to do it....

I just asked the fellow who found the watch to contact the police or military authorities....

0 rinserepeat over 1 year ago

It's too late because you've made changes on the watch which caused new files to overwrite old ones but you should have looked for deleted sectors with deleted FIT files.

If they installed datafields that means they likely tested some activities and then deleted them.

Search for all FIT files, sort by date

look at \GARMIN\Location\Lctns.fit

Basically all you can hope for is at some point GPS was on and written to a FIT file somewhere even deleted with remaining sectors not overwritten.

And that GPS was turned on near their home and not on a battlefield.

Only a government entity is going to be able to request Garmin look at their Connect data for a GPS location.

Did you look to see if the watch was ever paired with a phone?

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago in reply to rinserepeat

since its MTP its hard to make full dump. only physically detach EMMC and make a dump... yeah, it could be a bit late, but maybe we will de-weld it anyway and try to make sectors dump to find fit files. Previously I looked into all FIT files with fir viewer - saw only some steps in the background, nothing helpful.

0 Evgeniy P. over 1 year ago in reply to rinserepeat

no phone was found, and I've seen only saved wifi-s. I managed even see some bank in garmin pay files(Only 1 pass unlock attempt left), but no helpful info.