How Honest Are You?

[Zamo]

This isn't really about what the honest thing to do is. It is about whether the OP can get away with it and the answer to that is almost certainly yes.

 

The company obviously do not think the phone has been stolen or they would have blocked it. It is lost in the ether... keep it and say nothing.

[Cyclone]

Partially right, partially wrong: it's country-dependent (not all countries operate an EIR). The UK does, but nationally only (unless that's changed since I last looked at it). The Netherlands didn't used to, again dunno if that's changed.

 

In the example you give, your network provider would just record the (new) IMEI against the (known) IMSI in their db. You could still report the phone as stolen (if it happens) and it could still get blocked.

Right about the roaming 'strictly speaking', however how do you think a handset reported stolen can be and stay blocked by networks?

 

When a MS is connected to a network, the network can give it the identify command at any time. In response to this command the MS will transmit its IMSI, identifying the SIM, and IMEI, identifying the physical phone (ME). The IMSI ends up at the HLR, but the IMEI is checked against the stored identifiers in the EIR (if the network maintains one - see above).

 

The command is always given when the MS first connects to a network (like after a shutdown/start-up sequence, e.g. if you turned it off during a flight -where I was coming from re. 'roaming' above), and frequently given in network keep-alive signals: not every keep-alive signal of course, as that'd eat battery life like there's no tomorrow (and husbanding battery life is what research in cellular signal processing was pretty much all about BITD of 3G/4G tech...positively ancient by now), but every so often so that a stolen phone can be blocked very shortly after it's IMEI makes it onto an EIR.

 

 

I wasn't saying that they didn't know the IMEI, just that they don't routinely block any unrecognised ones, so unless they self report the phone as missing or deliberately search for that imei to see if one of their customers have it, then they won't know.

It's not the imei that tells your network provider you're roaming, and they won't have some sort of unusual imei reporting system that will highlight the customer as tjilstra suggested. These were the only points I was making.