I recently purchas a tour off of ebay and when I went to activate the phone they told me the ESN was still active. What can I do? Its a Sprint phone and I am with Sprint.
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It could also be that the previous owner did not know it had to be deactivated from his account prior to selling, I would approach the seller and explain that in order to activate it on your account they need to deactivate from theirs by calling Sprint.
There are a few possibilities.The seller is selling a phone:
1. where he still owes an outstanding balance
2. that is stolen or was reported as stolen/lost
3. that was reported lost/stolen, then found. In the meantime, the owner filed a claim and received a new phone.
Either way you're probably stuck. Unless the previous owner settles his/her bill with Sprint you cannot ever activate that phone on Sprint.
There is no legal way of selling or modifying that phone either as the phone currently belongs to Sprint - either as collateral for a bill or it belongs to Asurion, the company handling insurance claims for Sprint.
The best case scenario is that the owner cancelled his/her service, paid the bills but that it hasn't made its way through the computers - pretty unlikely.
Was the phone advertised as "clean ESN?" If so, then you can open a case with eBay. If it wasn't advertised as such then you might be out of luck.
