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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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...
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.
[delayed]
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.
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