Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of users using the old phones

Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by londons_explore on Friday May 06, 2022 @02:47AM (#31282049)

It's worth noting that many cheap android devices let you spoof the IMEI and other device identifiers. If so, just find someone else with the device you want to emulate and copy over the identifiers over. It's usually an app in the app list as "Set up Phone" or something - you type in the IMEI, hit save, and then reboot. Probably best to find someone not on the same network as you - many phone networks won't let two phones with the same IMEI connect at once.

It's very useful in countries like Turkey which don't allow foreign phones. So you need to copy the IMEI of a local unless you want to buy a new phone.

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Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by joecool1029 on Friday May 06, 2022 @05:38AM (#31283205)

>It's worth noting that many cheap android devices let you spoof the IMEI and other device identifiers.

Any devices this is going to work on will be old and will not support VoLTE. Modern smartphone SoC's (all the Qualcomm ones at least, which make up majority of US android devices) have the modem IMEI stored in memory that can't be modified, any guides on these devices are just about spoofing IMEI reported to android system, not to the network.

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Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by thedougd on Friday May 06, 2022 @08:55AM (#31284551)

Back in the Android 1.6 days, on many Qualcomm devices you could write all zeros to the IMEI, and then it'd let you write whatever IMEI you wanted. It was supposed to be read only. Carriers were launching new plans for 3G smartphones that were more expensive than the existing unlimited data plans intended for WAP phones. Move the IMEI from your old WAP phone to a new Android phone and you had very cheap unlimited data for a few years.

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Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by londons_explore on Friday May 06, 2022 @07:50AM (#31284035)

Cheap phones are nearly always Mediatek, and those have a debug tool to change the IMEI. I assume the OEM IMEI change functionality uses the same api.

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Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by Jtype on Friday May 06, 2022 @09:39AM (#31284931)

This is not true. My daughter's phone supported VoLTE but was not on the whitelist and service was terminated based on the IMEI. We had to order her a new (but actually older) phone that was on the approved list in order to reactivate service.

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Re:Tell HN: AT&T disabled phone numbers and accounts of user... by joecool1029 on Friday May 06, 2022 @03:34PM (#31288895)

> This is not true.

Which part of what I wrote isn't true? I'm talking about device IMEI spoofing, not AT&T's whitelist.

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