Going by eBay, a lot of people are still managing to sell stolen iPhones for $100-$300: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=icl0ud%20locked&LH_Compl...
What do you do with a iCould locked phone? It seems like a completely worthless device if it is locked.
Even if the answer is "nothing" it still makes sense they're selling on ebay—people don't know that they're buying a brick, and I'd bet that's extremely difficult to contest via ebay/paypal.
According to the link above, people know they are buying bricks.
I'm sure there are some folks trying to pass off locked iPhones as legit, but there are also people selling them "for parts" on Craigslist and I'm sure a load of other sites. I was just shopping for some test iPhones for work and there was one dude on Craigslist with a dozen or so new iPhones, all locked for like $80 "for parts".
Re:Securing a travel iPhone
by post_break on Friday July 08, 2016 @05:25PM
(#12058776)
Perfect for parts. New screens aren't cheap. Battery, camera modules, etc.
Yeah, you could part the whole thing out, but there's so little demand for used parts currently that it's tough to make a business case for it.
New screens are pretty cheap these days; under $40 for a new iPhone 6 screen wholesale currently. Used batteries are worth nothing since new batteries are so cheap (a new 6 battery is less than $10 -- why would you want a used one?) Camera, home button, charge port, prox sensor...even if you put all those together you'd barely have $100 worth of parts, and that's talking about new part prices (wholesale).
New screens are a lot cheaper than $200, which appears to be the price of iCloud locked phone.
"genuine Apple screen" vs. cheap aftermarket knockoff? I have no idea if there's much of a difference.
parts phone for repair of others, perhaps?
Since it's possible to call 911/112 with a GSM phone without SIM, the phone can still be tracked throughout the network with it's unique IMEI number.
They don't need to restore or power on to check activation lock.
You go to https://www.icloud.com/activationlock/
You have to think about it from the attacker's point of view. Anyone they sell it to is going to power it on to test it. Once it's powered on, it'll ping back.
Any black-market buyer knows to pop the SIM anyway before powering it on, and turn on the phone without any publicly-accessible Wifi access points available. But then they still have to restore it in order to see if it's iCloud locked, and the restore pings, too (it requires an Internet connection to Apple's servers to download a signed OS.)
What it comes down to is that stolen iPhones just aren't worth that much, since there's no easy way to remove an iCloud lock and the parts themselves aren't worth a lot. The good news is that far fewer iPhones are stolen these days (source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/iphone-thefts-down-thanks-to-app... ), and thieves are pretty quickly learning that.