Refurbished Galaxy S9 Showing Unknown IMEI

[tomlapsing]

I recently bought a refurbished Samsung Galaxy s9 off of Amazon. When I got it, I stuck my sim card in it and nothing happened. Doing a little digging I found that it has 'unknown' as the value for the IMEI. Is this something that I (or verizon) can fix, or do I need to just return the phone and look elsewhere?

Thanks!

 

[svim]

There are different methods to get your phone's IMEI:
https://www.samsung.com/ca/support/...find-the-imei-number-of-my-samsung-galaxy-s9/
and then once you do get it you might want to check that your refurbished phone hasn't been blacklisted:
https://www.imei.info/
A carrier might blacklist a particular phone because the previous owner didn't pay off their bills, or if a phone has been stolen. Once blacklisted, other carriers will also the phone from being used on their cellular networks too.
But if this phone has been blacklisted it's up to you to go through the process of clearing it -- you'll need to provide proof of ownership so be sure to keep all the documentation involved when you purchased it.
Of course that may not even be the case. Try removing your SIM card, and dig through the Settings menu of your S9 and find the 'Networking reset' option, This will wipe any stored WiFi networks and Bluetooth pairings (hopefully there isn't that much since you're apparently just setting up this phone), and it will return any cellular settings back to their defaults. If you can't determine the IMEI after a Networking reset than there is a problem, and it could be at a hardware level. If at this point I'd just return this phone and get one that's not having such problems. It's not normal to have to go through so much hassle to just set up a new(ish) phone.

 

[Jfalls63]

In past dealings with Samsung phones, a unknown IMEI or IMEI of 0 usually happens when the baseband and build doesn't match or a corrupt EFS partition.
Either way I would definitely send it back.