Tmobile locked my previously unlocked phone!

[JimS]

Switched to TMobile from ATT with an unlocked phone.  Reception was terrible at home so we decided to go with Cricket.  Cricket is owned by ATT and uses the same towers.  Cricket said they couldn't transfer the phone to them as it was locked.  TMobile said they didn't lock it and I should talk to Best Buy (where I bought the phone) or ATT but it is obviously not them as it hasn't been locked since I bought it about 5 years ago.  We were able to port our numbers to new phones but upset that TMobile locked the phone without telling us.  Will be paying a visit to their store but I expect the runaround and denials.  Anyone have any experience with this?

 

[LarrylLix]

Porting a number from phone to phone is not related to the phone being locked. I suspect your phone was never unlocked.
 
After 5 years I would suspect the firmware would become unusable anyway. My wife's 5-6 year old iPad became obsolete and the apps she had working previously would not work with her running O/S. (Mostly Netflix). Then the O/S was not upgradable to the O/S version that was capable of running that version. So she wet out and bought a new iPad that had the same memory and speed as she tossed aside.
 
IOW: they have got you by the short and curlies, and there isn't much you can do about it. The device is not yours anymore....you just rent space on it.

 

[JimS]

The phone works fine.  It's a little low on memory that limits the number of apps I can install but otherwise works ok. 
 
Turns out the phone is apparently not locked but something is going on.  I got new phones from Cricket.  I put the Cricket SIM into the old phone and that worked.  But still when Cricket scans the phone to put it on their network it still comes back as not being able to activate it on their network.  I just planned to keep the old phones around for backup if the new phones get damaged and they still work on wifi which is handy for some things around the house. 

 

[LarrylLix]

All the phones I have bought for about 5 years now, have all come unlocked. Since you can have any phone unlocked by hackers for about $10 now, I think the providers little scam has seen its last days, anyway so I don't know why they would bother trying to do it remotely or after the fact.

Having said that there us ways some new money grab thing coming at us.

Sent from my SM-G781W using Tapatalk