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SIM not supported in German phone

Hello, my friend from Germany bought an iPhone6 in the US while being on a student exchange program and activated it with a Verizon prepaid card. Recently, after returning to Germany, the phone was broken and replaced by a local German Apple store. After that, the initial activation was done through WiFi, with the Verizon prepaid card inserted. Now, it's not possible to enter any other SIM any more, we get always stuck at the message 'SIM not supported'. I can only imagine that the initial activation through WiFi somehow locked the phone to Verizon, since it was a vanilla German phone in it's sealed package.

Question is now: how to remove this lock? The original prepaid phone number is meanwhile deleted (I suppose due to inactivity), so there is no way to get anywhere on the prepaid support number.

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Verizon_Support

Cisco_90, thank you so much for reaching out to us today. We want your friend to be able to use their cell phone service in Germany. Placing the Verizon Wireless SIM Card in the phone they received in Germany will not work. The Verizon SIM Card will only work for activation while here in the United States. At this point, since the phone was replaced in Germany through Apple, we would highly suggest that your friend works with Apple and their cellular carrier in Germany. Does this make sense?

Kevin_VZW
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Cisco_90

Hello Kevin,

the phone won't work in Germany with the Verizon SIM, but unfortunately it's not possible any more to insert any other SIM. The Phone will always, when inserting a SIM form another provider, ask for activation. This is then ending up with the message 'The SIM card is not supported', According to the Apple store here in Germany this is indicating a provider lock to Verizon, and the said that only Verizon can remove this lock and they can't do anything.

We called the phone number provided for removing activation locks on prepaid phones on the Verizon web page (888.294.6804), but since the number is deleted meanwhile (I suspect due to inactivity) we are stuck. Question is whom to call or what to do to remove this lock, since in the current stage you can use the phone only with WiFi.

Cisco_90

Hello, has somebody from the support team any suggestion ? I'm ready to pay for the unlocking, but as it stands now the phone is unusable. Once again, the activiation on the phone (the had been replaced by a German Apple store) has been done with the Verizon SIM inserted, but through WiFi. Thereafter, any attempt to insert another SIM card will trigger again the activation process of the phone and will end up with the "SIM not supported" message.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

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