Kyle Nazario

I had a terrible experience buying a refurbished phone from Amazon Renewed. I would not recommend purchasing from them.

TL;DR: Amazon Renewed sold me a phone blacklisted for fraud. Trying to activate it on my partner’s account got us suspended.

The longer version is I bought my partner a new phone, because their old one heated up too much under regular use. I purchased a refurbished 64 GB third-gen red iPhone SE from Amazon. The product listing claims:

This product is inspected, tested, and refurbished, as necessary to be fully functional according to Amazon Renewed standards.

I received the phone and spent several hours backing up my partner’s data, updating the new and old phone to the latest version of iOS, and transferring their data to the new phone. I put the old SIM card into the new phone. Then everything went wrong.

The phone would not connect to 4G or make calls. When I logged onto Verizon’s website, I saw the account was suspended for “non-payment.” This made no sense, because we have never missed a phone bill.

I got ahold of Janna, a customer support rep, through their online chat ¹. Janna was great. She explained to me that the new phone was “under non-pay status” and my account was suspended due to a “fraud issue.”

Janna said:

Appreciate your patience. Upon checking here, The new phone is under Non pay status also like your old phone.

That means you cannot use this phone to any carrier or service at all. Where did you get to buy this phone?

When I said it was a refurb from Amazon Mobile, she replied (emphasis mine):

Ohh I see, You need to bring this back to them and refund your money or get a new one. This phone cannot be activated to any service at all. This phone is not paid in full when they purchased it. Sorry about that.

We are advising all our customers to avoid buying phone online or in Amazon because of this issue. You can buy one in Walmart or our Verizon store.

This took me a bit to understand, having never heard of blacklisting. Isn’t a phone a phone? Why is it my problem the previous owner fell behind on their payments?

The worst part, Janna explained, is by putting the old SIM into the new phone, the SIM and my partner’s account were flagged for non-pay fraud too. She had to manually unlock the account and SIM. We put the old SIM back in the old phone and thankfully it started working again.

My uninformed guess is Verizon suspends any account that tries to activate a non-pay phone to prevent repeated fraud. Otherwise, I could:

• Use the phone on their network for as long as they’ll let me without paying my bill
• Get suspended
• Open a new account under a different name with the same phone
• Repeat

Verizon’s IMEI help page warns you to check if a device is blacklisted before activating (thanks). But they don’t tell you how! I had to look on Reddit to find the page where Verizon verifies a device is “compatible with the network.” I recommend this over third-party IMEI checking websites. I tried the blacklisted IMEI with one of those and it told me the phone was clean.

Don’t repeat my mistakes. Don’t try to activate a used phone without checking the IMEI first, and don’t buy from Amazon Renewed. They accepted my return and refunded my money, but man, it was not worth the trouble.