If you get mugged, hand that one over. Nobody ever expects someone to have a dummy phone so they’ll take it and go, leaving you with your real phone. My brother was just mugged recently in Honolulu and gave them an old iPhone 8 he paid $30 for and they took off. He went back to his hotel with his actual phone perfectly safe and in his possession, and since it has one of those phone wallet things he still has all his credit cards too

I don’t know where he got the idea, but his experience convinced me to do the same. Grabbed an old iPhone off eBay with a cracked screen for $25. Putting an old case on it and keeping it with me when I travel now.

ETA 1: I don’t know exactly which part of town he was in. I could guess based on my own past experiences but they’d only be guesses. I’ll ask him next time we talk.

ETA 2: Honolulu is a great town, but it’s also still a real American city, and yes they have crime too. My brother got mugged. It happens. This is the real world, not Disneyland. I’m not sure why that is so difficult for some to understand.

ETA 3: If you don’t care for the advice, don’t use it. As someone who travels a lot and has both witnessed and been the victim of petty street crime, I plan to. It’s a low cost, low effort way to hedge against losing something very valuable to me. It worked in my brother’s case, so it clearly isn’t just a myth.

ETA 4: I had never encountered the idea until he told me about it. Apparently it has been a thing for some time. I don’t claim that he invented it. His experience was simply the first I’d heard of it. Let that be that.