[AnthonyMouse]

There are a zillion phones that come to be refurbished because they originally had corporate owners. The IT department issues new phones and ends up with a giant pile of old phones, many of which are damaged, which aren't worth their time to sort out and resell, so they get thrown on a pallet and go in bulk to an electronics recycler.

The recycler sorts the phones from the PCs from the laser printers and the phones go to a company that refurbishes phones. Now they've got a thousand iPhones from a dozen companies, legally-obtained, which are locked to the personal Apple account of some salesman three deep in the supply chain and they don't even know which specific company they're from, much less which salesman.

So none of those phones can be refurbished, that person can't buy them, and the remaining phones they could buy -- which necessarily can't go to as many people as the larger number of phones -- cost more as a result of supply and demand.

[scarface74]

How do you propose you fix that and still keep shady refurbishers from selling stolen phones? Even if the refurbishing company is trustworthy what is to guarantee that all of the employees are and they don’t get kickbacks for mixing in stolen phones with the legitimate ones?

This isn’t far fetched. Many SIM swaps are done by employees of carriers taking bribes to help thieves perform SIM swaps. They aren’t all done by social engineering.

Now suppose none of that occurs and Apple unlocks phones. Now a phone that has user data on it that was formerly encrypted is available to a third party.

Yes Apple could perform a remote wipe, but again why would Apple want to get in the middle of that? What if someone was being malicious and copied someone’s serial number and asked Apple to do a remote wipe?

Long story short, if the phone wasn’t unlocked before it was given to the refurbisher, you have know way of knowing whether the phone was stolen.