Verizon imposes new roadblock on users trying to unlock paid-off phones

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/verizon-makes-customers-wait-35-days-to-unlock-fully-paid-off-phones/

by josephcsible • 5 months ago

37 6 5 months ago

iancarroll• 5 months ago

Verizon did manage to convince the FCC that this was enough a problem to change their settlement agreement[0] requiring more frequent unlocks. If you believe their numbers, they lost 700,000 phones to fraud in 2023, although a lot of those were probably any unlocked phone that defaulted on its payments.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fcc-revises-v...

wolvoleo2• 5 months ago

Why not just buy a phone outright. I never buy contract phones. They're not free, you're just paying for them through what is really just a loan.

toast0• 5 months ago

I bought a prepaid phone from a 'Verizon Value' brand recently, because buying the same phone unlocked was more expensive than buying it locked, pay for a month of service that I didn't use any of, then leave it in a drawer for two months.

This change makes that path unattractive to me, which is probably better for Verizon. I can see how 60 days ends up being too short to deal with fradulent purchases because charge backs are available for a long time. Changing the period to one year feels like way too long to validate purchases, and requiring active service for the whole year doesn't feel like validating a purchase either.

But I'm also on prepaid (on a different network). If you're on most postpaid plans, the cost of a phone subsidy is built into the plan, so if you don't take the subsidized phone, you're paying for something you're not getting.

wolvoleo2• 5 months ago

Oh yeah I'm always on prepaid, I don't like contracts/subscriptions so I avoid them even for phones. It's also a great protection against overcharging when roaming etc.

And where I live (in Spain) prepaid is even cheaper than postpaid. I get 240GB per month for 15 euros and basically unlimited calls (which I don't use because all my calls go over whatsapp these days). Even the 10 euro plan is great value (80GB). But sometimes I use my phone as a hotspot so it's nice to have the extra.

Postpaid isn't as good value as that. Probably because the subsidy is factored in, or at least some of it.

We don't really get chargebacks here in Europe, because 99% of people use debit cards and they don't have such a feature.

RulerOf• 5 months ago

The device is paid through a loan. That makes radio locks more preposterous, not less.

Breaking a contract is far less serious than defaulting on a loan. And if the cell providers' argument is "we need radio locks because fraud," remember they're full of crap.

It's not every consumer's fault that Verizon made hundreds of thousands of bad decisions about to whom they decided to extend credit last year. It's theirs.

This change in policy came less than a week after Verizon suffered a high-visibility outage[1] that left scores of people unable to use their phones. Before this policy change, customers could at least pick up an eSIM on another network for emergencies. Not anymore. Thanks, FCC.

[1] https://www.the-sun.com/tech/15782764/verizon-down-sos-mode-...

arduanika• 5 months ago

Careful before trusting that any of the quotes in an Ars Technica article are real! Default assumption should be that it's all hallucinated unless you've checked it personally. They don't check it in-house.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059

Verizon imposes new roadblock on users trying to unlock paid-off phones

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