UK Edition
'My £460 iPhone stopped working'
Last year I bought an iPhone through eBay for my son. It was from an apparently private seller, brand new, unused, sealed in the box and locked to the Vodafone network.
All was well until six months later, when the phone suddenly stopped being able to send or receive calls or text messages or use data.
We can still use it for the internet through Wi‑Fi.
It appeared that the Sim card was faulty but we were eventually told that the device had been reported lost or stolen.
I tried to contact the seller several times through eBay but have had no response.
I did not report the problem to eBay directly as the transaction was now out of time. PayPal could not help for the same reason.
Vodafone said the phone had been blacklisted as it had an insurance claim against it. I have reported the matter to the police.
SM, Somerset
You paid £460 for the iPhone.
A possible scenario for all this is that someone may have lost the phone or had it stolen and only realised much later and made an insurance claim then.
Meanwhile the phone may have found its way to eBay and to you. Or a fake claim may have been made for a phone that had not really been lost.
Then the claimant may have sold it on, having benefited from the insurance money. Given the seller’s eerie silence, something of the kind seems likely.
To safeguard against this and situations where a claimant, despite making a claim, may start to use a phone again, such phones are blacklisted.
For you what all this means is that it is too late for the redress you might otherwise have been eligible for.
Vodafone cannot have the phone removed from the blacklist database, which is a national one to prevent crime and is not owned by Vodafone.
- Jessica Gorst-Williams tackles consumer problems for Telegraph readers every week. To contact her, click here. If you want to ask a general money question, email moneyexpert@telegraph.co.uk. The best of the answers are included in our weekly newsletter