Purchased an iPhone 6, MEID is bad but IMEI is clean and ICCID unknown?

Well the question says it all really. I bought an iPhone and was told it had a clean IMEI. I looked it up and well, it sure was! So I was excited to have a cheaper iPhone I can use. However, when trying to activate it I was told I needed a SIM card for the carrier (in this case Sprint) but I did not have one. Being the curious bee that I am, I tried looking for workarounds to activate it without a chip. I stumbled upon the little "i" symbol when you first turn on the device, in which it popped up the MEID, IMEI, and ICCID (which is unknown so I'm not sure if that's good or bad) numbers. Seeing as I had nothing better to do, I looked up every number in checks. MEID came up blacklisted, but the IMEI came up clean on all checks for multiple carriers, including Sprint itself. I used Swappa and other websites to check and all gave me the same results. So what gives?