The first of my replacement things have begun to arrive. Today's delivery is the Samsung S8 that wasn't stolen, just severely damaged, probably beyond repair.

Fun little story about the last one (I think I told it as it was happening back in the Reddit days):

I bought the first one off of eBay about a year ago just before I moved out of the last place. I think I scored it for like 60 bucks because it was cracked. It was listed as carrier locked, but when it arrived, I found out that it was actually phone locked. It seems that it was wiped through recovery mode and had a Google account linked, which triggered some safety feature that prevented it from being set up again until the original account was signed in and then removed. I did my due diligence before I purchased it, and the IMEI wasn't reported stolen anywhere that I could tell. I believe it was really just a case of not being wiped properly.

I had a back and forth with the seller about it. He was being a dick. He was like "but I listed it as locked! You should've read the description!!!" And I was like "no dude, you said it was CARRIER LOCKED. You didn't say it was bloody account locked!". I decided I'd keep it and work on it as a side project, after all, security systems on old phones are not infallible. And I also got it for like half the price of what they generally go for, so I figured if it didn't work I could probably rip it apart and sell the parts for a profit.

I went down a very long YouTube rabbit hole trying a bunch of different solutions. None worked. Eventually I stumbled upon a video with like 160 views with some dodgy windows exe on MediaFire linked in the description. Against better judgement, I decided to install it on an old laptop just to see if maybe it would work. Surprisingly, it did. It had an odd name, from memory it was like "Sam Vishnu's Cell Phone Hacking Tool" and had clearly been thrown together very quickly. Looked like shit. Somehow though, it did work! It was interesting watching it control my phone through USB. I think it worked through calling one of those special codes (with the hashtags) in the emergency call app, then somehow opening the gallery, which unlocked it and then going to settings and letting me log into My google account. I didn't even know you could control a phone like that through USB, but apparently you can.

I ended up getting it to work, and have used it for a few projects since. As far as I can tell, it never did infect my laptop, or phone, but I wiped both of them anyway just to be sure. I've actually been meaning to find the video and chuck the guy a few bucks. After all it worked and he didn't waste any time or try and sell me shit. After I got into the phone, I immediately upgraded to the latest security patch I could, which isn't susceptible to whatever that tool did.

Edit: it also took too long to arrive and he gave me a fake tracking number, he blamed his staff for it, which I accepted at the time, but after I realised it was locked, I reckon it was intentional