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Help What happens when you report a phone stolen?

R

reddeaddorito

Android Enthusiast
Does the phone in question get data bricked or does the service just stop working until you start up a new one?

This guy wants to buy my phone but he's scared I'm gonna scam him ._.

but I'm pretty certain that even if I did pull a move like that, he'd just be able to activate it anyway.
 
It probably varies by country but I'd imagine the most you'd expect is to have the service (voice and data) cut off.

Applications like Lookout provide things like Remote Wipe (as a paid for addon to their free app) so I wouldn't imagine any provider having that capacity themselves.
 
agentc13 said:
If it's reported stolen, they will blacklist the ESN and not allow it to connect to the towers.
Click to expand...

In addition, if the person goes to try and activate it, the reps will get a notification that the phone has been marked stolen and they will probably have to notify the police or do something in order to get that notification removed. I say the reps, because you'll most likely get an error during activation to tell you to call customer service to complete the activation.

Edit: One time, I saw somebody at bb that was trying to activate their phone and apparently Sprint was showing that the esn was marked stolen and many hours later, the customer was still there waiting to get that resolved. It was not a pretty sight.
 
I wouldn't see the big concern (I at least) wouldn't have that fear that if I were buying a used MT that the person would scam me. Wheres the return value? Sure you're up the extra cash, but thats all.

My sister had dropped her phone getting into the car (quite a few years ago, it was the Slice if you remember that VM phone) and she didn't notice.. when she got home she realized what had happened.. long story short we looked at her account online and noticed phone calls being made and texts being sent. So we called up vm reported it stolen, they deactivated the device, and froze her account until she was able to get a new phone on her account.

Don't know anything that happened with the phone after that.
 
agentc13 said:
If it's reported stolen, they will blacklist the ESN and not allow it to connect to the towers.
Click to expand...


^^^This will normally happen right away, and it will never become unlocked till the person who reported it stolen confirms they got it back or something


i believe some companies allow you to check ESN numbers so if you were to buy a phone from Ebay or something, you could first call in the ESN and see


ps. lol if you go on ebay half the ESN's youll see are marked as stolen, lol at least lasttime i checked
 
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