Help IMEI reported lost/stolen in error on N5 I bought new

[rbatzell]

Bought my nexus 5 nearly two years ago, used it no problems until about 12 hours ago. I've been working in Europe for the past five months, and used t-mobile data, texts no problem. I get off the plane in the US, and no signal. No data, calls, text, won't even pick up the local time.

I go to a T-mobile store, they say it appears someone has reported the phone's IMEI lost or stolen, although it's not Tmobilie, so they can't do anything about it. Suggest calling google.

Call google, they say they don't have anything to do with blocking or unblocking IMEI. They suggest going carrier by carrier to see if maybe someone from ATT or Verizon or whatever messed up a digit or two and ended up locking my phone's IMEI by mistake. Can this really happen? Seems insane, and way too prone to errors. This also seems like a fools errand, but so far has been the only suggestion.

I have my receipt from Google, can easily prove I bought the phone years ago. Anyone have any ideas on how remove the IMEI block on my phone? Or find out what company orignated the IMEI block so I can prove that I am actually the legitimate owner?

If there is a more relevant forum, place to research, that'd be helpful too. Been searching around and pretty much drawing a blank.

 

[Gatman]

Wow...interesting. I just Googled this a bit out of curiosity, and found a handful of folks with similar experiences (e.g. IMEI blocked when phone wasn't actually stolen). Unfortunately, I didn't see any with a good resolution.

Try entering your IMEI here and see if it provides any details:

http://www.imeidetective.com/

I poked around a bit on here, and some of the ones reported stolen had some fair amount of details on them. Maybe you'll luck out and find something there that might help.

~Gary