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I bought an ATT locked iPhone SE from Ebay just 2 months ago. The unlocking process was essentially just going to ATT website and typing in the IMEI and they unlock it within 15 minutes for free. I assume all the "pay $10 to unlock your phone" services are just counting on the average person being too lazy to discover your can just do the legwork yourself.

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The mobile operator provided unlock only works on devices of a certain age. You can't typically, for example, purchase a new flagship device and unlock it on day one. The illegitimate methods bypass this restriction.

Also, AT&T will only allow two unlocks for non-customers.

So if you left AT&T, you can only unlock two devices.

Theres a method of unlocking new/any iOS device using the GSX api that Apple maintains for the remaining list of Authorized Stores. Apple will not approve anyone new for the list, and they have changed up the requirements to connect to the API lately from just a username/password (which were often hacked or bribed), to client side certificates and blessed static ips (at a time when even the OS X networking libraries didn't support this), to a new version just now that I won't give the details but you can find if you do some github searching.

This only works if the person who bought the phone from AT&T paid all their bills. If they had an outstanding bill from with the initial contract, the unlock would not have been completed.

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