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Stolen phones used to be worth a lot more before Apple threw iCloud locks on and the IMEI blacklists became a thing. Now a stolen phone is mostly only valuable

Stolen phones used to be worth a lot more before Apple threw iCloud locks on and the IMEI blacklists became a thing. Now a stolen phone is mostly only valuable for parts if it isn't fenced quickly, so there's really not the same incentive there used to be. The only thing IMEI blacklisting has succeeded in doing is making it a bitch to buy phones on the used market. At any time the seller could do insurance fraud and claim the phone is stolen and now that phone is (domestically) a tablet at best and the purchaser is left with no recourse. At least with a vendor system like iCloud, there's a fast way to make sure the phone's signed out when you do a purchase on Craiglist or other third party site. At some point we're going to be looking at titling phones (I'm amazed Apple hasn't done so yet) if we ever want to see a used phone market without insurance requirements happen again.

mindslight 6y ago
Titles could actually make things worse. Right now, if you buy a phone and it ends up on the blacklist after the return period, you can find a service that changes the IMEI or figure it out yourself if you can stand to wade through forum FUD. Since a significant number of blacklisted phones are from broken finance contracts, a phone simply being in the blacklist does not imply that it was stolen - a broken finance contract is a civil matter purely between the carrier and the original owner. Therefore, rewriting the IMEI on such a phone is completely legal, at least in the US. Whereas if phones had titles, then a financed phone could have a legal encumbrance recorded on that title after you thought you'd bought it outright, and changing the IMEI to get out from that would be illegal. Phones are not incorporeal, immovable, expensive, or dangerous devices. Lacking all of the usual justifications for existing title systems, heading away from draconian registration makes more sense than heading towards it.

mindslight 6y ago

Titles could actually make things worse. Right now, if you buy a phone and it ends up on the blacklist after the return period, you can find a service that changes the IMEI or figure it out yourself if you can stand to wade through forum FUD. Since a significant number of blacklisted phones are from broken finance contracts, a phone simply being in the blacklist does not imply that it was stolen - a broken finance contract is a civil matter purely between the carrier and the original owner. Therefore, rewriting the IMEI on such a phone is completely legal, at least in the US. Whereas if phones had titles, then a financed phone could have a legal encumbrance recorded on that title after you thought you'd bought it outright, and changing the IMEI to get out from that would be illegal. Phones are not incorporeal, immovable, expensive, or dangerous devices. Lacking all of the usual justifications for existing title systems, heading away from draconian registration makes more sense than heading towards it.