Is There Anything I Can Do About Bad ESN?

The T-Mobile guy didn't know what he or she was talking about. Rewriting the ESN or IMEI is illegal, as in go to jail illegal if caught. And how would you know what to rewrite it to? There are lots of services on the Internet that claim they can do this. Most are outright scams; they will take your money and you will still have a useless phone afterwards. And it can't be done remotely; they must actually have possession of the phone.

What you CAN do is get a used and disabled Sprint SIM; you should then be able to activate the phone as an iPod. Apple does not enforce Sprint's blacklist; it's only if you try to activate it with a live Sprint SIM that you won't be able to do it.

Actually sir you can flash an iPhone and get a phone unlocked from sprint. I paid to have mine flashed because my aunt was murdered and my phone and my brothers phone were on her account and because neither of us could pay $350 bill every month they wanted their phones background or to pay the remaining balance on each. I paid $89 for my phone to be taken off sprints network and I have cricket now and the phone has worked great ever since. So your information that you're telling people is not true.

Jae1020 wrote:

Actually sir you can flash an iPhone and get a phone unlocked from sprint. I paid to have mine flashed because my aunt was murdered and my phone and my brothers phone were on her account and because neither of us could pay $350 bill every month they wanted their phones background or to pay the remaining balance on each. I paid $89 for my phone to be taken off sprints network and I have cricket now and the phone has worked great ever since. So your information that you're telling people is not true.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this thread. Phones can be unlocked from a carrier. The IMEI cannot be changed. Cricket doesn't care if you have an outstanding bill with Sprint. They will activate an unlocked phone on their network.

By the way, if you had your phone hacked to unlock it from Sprint as it sounds like you did, realize that the next time you update the iOS, it may end up being locked back to Sprint.

So for what reason did you purchase a TMO SIM, contact TMO, or even purchase a bad ESN device to begin with?

The device is useless... either it was reported stolen or it has a hardware issue.

Return it to the seller for a full refund or accept it as an expensive lesson.

Bad ESN usually means it has been reported stolen. And Sprint does not unlock phones for use in the US. You should return it.

No. The whole point of a blacklist is to block the phone from all carriers. Sprint shares with all of the US carriers. In addition, phones locked to Sprint can never be unlocked for any US carrier; Sprint will only unlock for carriers outside of North America.

Return the phone.

There is no way to "flash" an iPhone.

Since you think you know more than I do, why are you bothering to ask? Note that the article you linked to is a generic article for all cell phones. It is clearly wrong for iPhones because they have no ROM to flash. The ESN and IMEI is wired into hardware. Everything else (iOS settings, content, baseband) is in RAM. In any case, it is hacking the phone, and, as the article says, it may bring undesired attention to you if the phone actually is stolen.