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GoingDark said:
What do these scam sites do with harvested IMEI numbers anyway?
Click to expand...

Let's say a thief steals your iPhone tomorrow. You call the police and the network and the IMEI gets barred. Now the phone is useless as a phone in your country because the IMEI is blocked at network level.

At this point the thief has two options. They can change the IMEI or ship the phone to be sold abroad where it will work fine.

Most thieves go for the second option because it's easy, but it can also make them less money (either you know someone in another country to sell units to at cheaper than normal price or you sell on eBay and say "doesn't work in [x country]" basically admitting you have stolen goods).

If you have an iPhone that is jailbreakable you can probably change its IMEI too. It is illegal to do this but a phone thief obviously isn't worried about that. But not just any IMEI will do. It has to be a valid IMEI that is not already registered with a network in your country.

So a site like this is handy for our technically able thief. He gets the details of phone model, country, and network along with the IMEI. So lets say someone submits an iPhone 5 unlock, locked to AT&T in the US, but the thief is in Poland. He just changes his stolen iPhone 5's IMEI to that US IMEI and the phone will work again as normal in Poland. It won't work on AT&T in the US if the original phone is using that network but he knows his customer probably won't use AT&T anyway. He sells the phone for normal used price because it looks like it's not stolen, makes cash money.

So there you go.
 
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