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And AT&T/Apple will be quickly be paid a large legal lesson if they decide to teach him a $200 lesson. But, I highly doubt the legitimacy of the story.

Unless he finds solid proof, and a bunch others that suffers from the same problems after the same encounter - there's an extremely unlikely chance that AT&T/Apple will get into trouble.
 
Absolutely. Did a clean restore in iTunes, afterward it still refused to activate. QuickPwned it, now I can access the menu but it still will not pick up signal.

I had that problem, all I did was a force restore to normal firmware, saw that it still wouldn't connect then took it to the apple store. You give the phone to them complaining of no service. Let them restore it, find that it has some sort of problem connecting to the network and they will most likely give you a replacement, that's what happened to me.
 
Does he have a plan for the 3G? If he does, they should have gotten service at the apple store. If he doesn't, the worst thing Apple/ATT could have done was upgraded his plan to a 3G's plan.
You should tell your friend to go back into the ATT store and demand service as it is illegal for ATT/Apple to do this.
 
I had that problem, all I did was a force restore to normal firmware, saw that it still wouldn't connect then took it to the apple store. You give the phone to them complaining of no service. Let them restore it, find that it has some sort of problem connecting to the network and they will most likely give you a replacement, that's what happened to me.

I think, if you're going to take the risk of jailbreaking, the reciprocal expectation that you at least try to make sure the phone works after a DFU restore (not just a regular restore) before you take it to Apple is not at all unreasonable. This is coming from someone who owns an iPhone that has, in the past, been jailbreaked, and is currently unlocked using Pwnage.

I'm not entirely convinced by the legality arguments in either way. It seems a stretch to the extreme to me to claim that the Hush-A-Phone ruling applies directly to iPhone jailbreaking, since it seems completely unreasonable to me to draw the conclusion that, because interference with the Hush-A-Phone device was not "just, fair, and reasonable," that Jailbreaking is automatically also thus not "just, fair, and reasonable." I would think putting you on the IMEI blacklist would probably, were it taken to court, be considered an unreasonable retaliation, but denying you AT&T service, I'm much less sure about.
 
Stolen

The only instance that it would be banned is if it was stolen. That is per AT&T guidelines. If you have a receipt that you paid for it and then blocked it file a complinat with the Public Utility Commision in your area and the FCC.

I am leaning to stolen or reporting missing
 
The only instance that it would be banned is if it was stolen. That is per AT&T guidelines.

And am I mistaken or are there numerous threads that mention how AT&T won't even blacklist/block a stolen phone? (Merely shut off that line of service / SIM -- not stop the phone from working with another SIM)

The worst thing the Genius would do is make note of your serial/IMEI in their warranty records so you can't go home, restore the phone, and return claiming it's never been jailbroken and get someone else to honor your warranty.

I think the OP is confused about what's going on and is misinterpreting something else as nefarious action by the Genius...

How about starting over at the beginning explaining how the phone is broken, it's current software state, and asking for troubleshooting help?
 
I don't believe a word of it. :)

Signed up and talking crap the same day.. spam

You know it makes sense.. For me to waste my time presenting a confusing issue to a knowledgable crew of people and then ACTIVELY participating in the thread. Spam indeed.. And what exactly do you propose that I am advertising in all of this?

It couldn't just be that I had no reason to be part of this board before I had such an outlandish issue presented to me, no, that's unheard of.

/sarcasm

I created the thread with a question mark (?) for a reason. I'm merely relaying what I've been told by my friend, who has absolutely no reason to lie and is counting on me to do anything/everything I can to get his phone working again. He wouldn't tell me something that would lead me to believe the problem is out of my hands. The Genius said/did what he did, and now we're at where we're at.

That said, I've been doing some more googling and found out that a fair amount of people have been unable to get service after upgrading to 2.2, which is what the they updated his phone to at the store (2.1>2.2). So it's possible that the Genius took an Apple firmware issue as a jailbreak problem like a lazy, unhelpful oaf. The coincidence of this firmware issue striking simultaneously with the cold, suspicious words from the Genius led me to believe something that I'm no longer confident about.

Sorry for the initial assumption I made based on the information I had at the time, but a firmware problem is seeming much more likely than a blocked IMEI at this point. I figured restoring it twice would have solved an issue like that but apparently Knolly seems to think there is some sort of trick to it. I'm currently still waiting to get ahold of a Mac to use PwnageTool with Knolly's suggestion and hoping for the best.

If anyone else has any suggestion for this issue based on the assumption that it's a firmware problem, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for your time everyone.
 
Alright man, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

The activation problem you are referring to is hardware unlock like TurboSim. If he has an AT&T sim card, he shouldn't have any problem with 2.2 firmware. Only thing he did wrong might be the option of selecting to activate the phone or not.

My suggestion is to hold until Wednesday when Dev Team releases something.
 
wow i got "flagged" by a genius guy at a apple store for bricking my device by unlocking it with the early unlock that came out for the first iphone man those were the days, but ya he wrote my imei into there computers and i fixed the the bricked iphone with iphonesimfree, but anywho i came in the genius bar to another apple store with a battery problem and no questions asked replaced and he also typed in my imei number and all that. So i really dont believe that one genius member completely rendered your friends device useless, to the point where no service occured and everything. Call at&t up and ask whats up if they tell you a apple representative shut you down then thats your answer.
 
The activation problem you are referring to is hardware unlock like TurboSim.

No I'm definitely familiar with the 2.2 SIM proxy issue, but he's legit with AT&T. I found a lot of articles around, even on Apple's support site about legit AT&T people losing the ability to get signal after going to 2.2, I wonder if they went a little overboard with patching up the newest baseband update and didn't do enough testing before release.

Thanks for the story polishmacuser, it's good to know that the "flagging" doesn't seem to carry between stores. I'm very paranoid about my illegitimate 2G getting dead screen spots eventually and it's good to know that there's hope in possibly getting them to honor the warranty if/when that should happen.
 
wow i got "flagged" by a genius guy at a apple store for bricking my device by unlocking it with the early unlock that came out for the first iphone man those were the days, but ya he wrote my imei into there computers and i fixed the the bricked iphone with iphonesimfree, but anywho i came in the genius bar to another apple store with a battery problem and no questions asked replaced and he also typed in my imei number and all that. So i really dont believe that one genius member completely rendered your friends device useless, to the point where no service occured and everything. Call at&t up and ask whats up if they tell you a apple representative shut you down then thats your answer.
You sound very credible.
 
I mean thats me i dont know if everyone else can be that lucky but hey my local apple store is horrible with there geniuses i went to the one near my dads house, the genius also gave me attitude, he was going on his lunch break and i basically stopped him. The whole day really screwed me over. But try and see whats the worst that could happen really?
 
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