URGENT: How to restore an “unavailable” iPhone without losing data? My mother’s lost without it!

I really need someone at Apple, or with proper solutions, to pay attention to this conundrum. Please limit your contribution to what you know factually so that we can find a workable solution asap. 

Main Points:

BOTTOM LINE: we need to restore an iPhone 7 from an UNAVAILABLE status asap. We are hoping that a reset link to access her locked out iCloud account will help us achieve this goal. We’re hoping that accessing the iCloud account will provide us with the steps to make the phone AVAILABLE, or at the very least, give us an opportunity to download some data from the account to the iPhone. The reset is set to be sent on August 24th, exactly one month after we tried to access the account. 

My mother’s iPhone 7 is UNAVAILABLE due to a number of attempts at figuring out the access passcode. This has been going on since July 24. Therefore, she has no access to her data or access to her family and friends. This affects her well-being. My mother is based in Sydney, Australia. 

My mother has short-term memory issues due to old age but compounded by a recent surgery that has profoundly affected her ability to remember day-to-day details, including her passwords and passcodes to everything! Contact with family is part of her rehabilitation. 

 For general information, her wifi is provided by Telstra, her iPhone is on contract with Vodafone Australia, and perhaps most importantly she has an Apple ID/iCloud account that has locked her out until August 24th due to automatic security measures to protect the account. A reset code is meant to be sent to her associated email address. 

I provided my NYC-based cell phone number as the second step in the two-step verification process. My Sydney-based sibling and I, living permanently in NYC, will try to coordinate accessing her iCloud account when the reset is sent to our mother’s email account on the 24th. We’re hoping to recover her data by unlocking the phone from the iCloud account, or to reluctantly erase her phone in order to download whatever data she has saved in her iCloud account. 

We don’t know if either of these choices are even possible. 

My sibling is not an Apple user but has access to the phone, I will do my best to figure things out with them remotely in real time but none of it’s going to be easy because of time zone differences and the fact we both have young families who somewhat limit our ability to spend vast  amounts of time working on this issue. 

We desperately need help figuring out the best possible path forward so that our mother can recover her phone and go back to using it the way she has become accustomed. PLEASE HELP US!

Background 

My elderly mother, who lives permanently in Sydney, Australia, has recently undergone surgery that has affected her short-term memory. This means for the purposes of this issue that she has no recollection of any passwords or passcodes in her life. 

On July 24th, while being the good son visiting from NYC after a five-year absence due to COVID, I updated her Apple iPhone 7, so she could continue using it to keep in contact with her family via WhatsApp, FaceTime etc. This is a lifeline for her as most of her family and friends live overseas, including me and my family. I made the mistake of leaving my mother’s home before finishing the upgrade process, which led to my mother trying a number of times to access her phone and unintentionally locking up her phone. I tried to guess a number of standard PIN sequences, eg: 000000, 111111, 88888888, 123456. None worked. The phone became UNAVAILABLE. 

Since my mother has no recollection of any passwords or passcodes, we had to guess what username she used for her iCloud account. We managed to figure how to access the email account associated with the iCloud account and hoped for a reset to help us unlock the phone. Apple, of course, has to set up a two-step verification process by texting the access codes directly to her iPhone. Therefore, when given a chance, I provided  my own NYC-based cell phone number to facilitate the process. The number was accepted but the iCloud account was locked out until August 24th, when a reset link will be sent to my mother’s email account. 

We asked CSRs at Telstra, Vodafone, and a number of Apple geniuses in Sydney to help but no one had any workable solutions for us. How can this be? I hope that people see that this is clearly more than just about restoring an iPhone. Some people like my mother don’t function in the world the way that Apple and others seem to think we should. She can’t and she’s paying a price that is disproportionately punitive.

My sibling and I, in two different continents and a 14-hour time difference, and very little technical knowledge between us will try to coordinate a recovery of the phone but it may all be folly. We need solutions and useful guidance. PLEASE HELP.  THANK YOU.