Log into that phone software or it'll die

Doesn't it seem a little odd for some Singapore Polytechnic students to bother creating software that disables a cellphone and alerts the authorities if a cellphone isn't given the proper credentials when the SIM is swapped? It does to us — in fact, we're completely baffled why they think, "It defeats the purpose of theft." The purpose of theft being to steal something, all it does is make it harder to turn a profit stealing phones — see the software, trash the phone before your third failed login attempt (and subsequent lockout / tracking to the government-registered SIM). No, what we have here is a failure to communicate; you want to dupe the thief into thinking the phone is just dandy long enough for the authorities to track it by triangulation, and bust the sucka. Plus, our way you don't have to register the SIMs, all you do is register the stolen handsets. Is it really that hard, people? And all this for a country with reported cellphone thefts in the 3,000s?

[Via Textually]