How do eBay sellers get cheap unlock codes

[Guest markhuges]

Hello I have a question

On eBay people say they unlock the phone from around £2-£3

But exactly what do they have/what do they do ?

how exactly do they manage to unlock the phone

And how so cheap? I remember the old days unlocking costed £15-£10!!!!!

Thank you

[Guest tillaz]

Hello I have a question

On eBay people say they unlock the phone from around £2-£3

But exactly what do they have/what do they do ?

how exactly do they manage to unlock the phone

And how so cheap? I remember the old days unlocking costed £15-£10!!!!!

Thank you

 

i don't think it ever actually "realy" cost £10 to £15, that's just what people charge, more than likely cost them nothing they just have the software /  hardware to do it.

and in the case of these unlock codes i think they have access to the servers to generate them... or they have cracked the algorithm to generate them

possibly from been an employee at the company that deals with that stuff.

 

i unlocked my moto G from ebay for £2.03, main thing that matters is it works  :)

[Guest markhuges]

i don't think it ever actually "realy" cost £10 to £15, that's just what people charge, more than likely cost them nothing they just have the software /  hardware to do it.

and in the case of these unlock codes i think they have access to the servers to generate them... or they have cracked the algorithm to generate them

possibly from been an employee at the company that deals with that stuff.

 

i unlocked my moto G from ebay for £2.03, main thing that matters is it works  :)

So if a software or something like that generates it, where can i get that software from? If you acquire the software you can unlock phones for free? Why dont people give them for free?

[Guest tillaz]

So if a software or something like that generates it, where can i get that software from? If you acquire the software you can unlock phones for free? Why dont people give them for free?

 

like i said, the people who have it ether cracked the algorithm that generates the unlock code from the IMEI, or they have or had access to the company

and most people who come across this stuff probably see the potential to make lots of money from it, and keep that info to them self, because if they don't its no longer valuable, but at £2.03 it is practically free, and not worth thinking about. 

 

if you had the chance to make thousands, would you take it? or give it away for free?

its all about making money, everyone wants to, just look at the iphones... they cost no more than 250 to make, why are they sold to us for more than double? (549)

[Guest cts_casemod]

This is a bit sensitive subject...

 

In the "older days" people had to buy an "unlocking box"

Basically this would connect to the data port on the phone and would read the EEPROM (Internal memory) parameters where the factory lock was set in order to by-pass it, replacing the memory contents with ones from a known unlocked phone. Through this it was also possible to crack down the algorithm and offer codes if they were mathematically generated, say, from the phone's IMEI. These things were expensive because each model and sometimes each firmware revision could contain different information and hence the box manufacturer would need to provide a constant support.

 

Each box, that could be good for only one brand of phones would cost typically £300-500, with multibrand units costing more. so how much you would charge depended on how many of those models you would unlock. Not free, but if you unlock 10 a day and charge £10 you would get a fairly quick return on investment.

 

As things evolved the manufacturers started making these EEPROMs non user accessible meaning that the phone would have to be physically open and connections made directly to the chip. This would, in most cases, invalidate the warranty and was a risky procedure that who ever did the unlock had to assume, since the phone could be bricked, not as in today (Software) but more seriously in hardware. If not done properly the phone could fail later due to a poor solder or other problems. It was also a labout intensive job that only skilled people could do, hence even more expensive that the usual £10 or 15.

 

Bare in mind that the whole game was always a code, but not knowing the algorithm you either had to access the phone memory to unlock as explained above, or at least to understand how it would be possible to generate that algorithm and create a software. Some were very complex indeed and a new market emerged; The online unlock. By this time most headsets had USB, so a piece of software (which was a more sophisticated dongle) was used, but instead of everything being done on your computer it was sent to a server to be decoded and the phone was flashed with the resulting compiled image for the lock section (Not the firmware). This was very secure to those offering the service and the data exchanged was encrypted and hard to obtain.

 

At this time unlock codes were expensive, as they should be (not finding a debate, but if your operator covers some of the cost, the whole point is you stay with them, hence phone locked) so a lot of people would investigate this and create software for such dongles or even algorithms to decode them that could be used in web pages as remote unlocking services.

 

Nowadays I am not sure why, people seem to have access to this easily. Perhaps they work at the respective brands, because moto g for example had unlock codes since it came out and many others do as well.

 

The whole point of having cheap codes is that it is so cheap to get them that it is not worth the effort to other people to decode the algorithm, hence most of the market share goes to a small number of members, and if they sell 100 codes a day that is easily an income. But of course there are always 3rd parties making money from this. If you go to an high street shop to have this service done, although they buy the code from the same place as you, they will still charge you £15 for the service. That's their job, if some people are not smart or have the time to do it themselves it is considered as any other service and you have to pay the labor, which is fair.

 

Same thing when Nokia codes first appeared. I don't know where they came from in 1st place although there is a theory Nokia leaked the algorithm in order to make their phones more visible to the market, and surely if for the same price I had the choice to either unlock or to get a phone I could unlock for free and had more features I would go for the one with more features. But as always, even tough they were free many people charged to unlock this phones. Well you can see this in two ways: One they are doing a genuine service, but of course there are always those who take advantage and charge way above what they should... £30's 40's, etc. A bit everywhere this happens. I sometimes say: Not all jobs are they same and not all sweat is worth the same sadly... But that's for another debate ;)

Edited December 13, 2013 by cts_casemod