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Comment by pwim | Hacker News Reader

The serial number matches mine. I suppose they could have scratched it off and repainted it, but that seems doubtful.

It’s possible they took it to a local shop that paid them and swapped out the internals with a stolen laptop’s. The external case returned to you would be the same.

I think your second theory about how Activation Lock turned on is the most likely. My understanding is that if Find My wasn't active, then Activation Lock also wasn't enabled. The person who incorrectly received the laptop probably wiped it and set it up under their personal account, activating Find My + Activation Lock.

If the laptop had originally had Activation Lock enabled, the unintended recipient would not have been able to do this, and as a bonus, the location of the laptop would have been trackable.

So, I don't think they had to swap the laptop out for another Activation Locked laptop... they probably locked it themselves, whether intentionally or not.

And entered an incorrect password 90 times?

I don't see how that's relevant; there are many ways bad passwords could have been entered. We have no way to know the package wasn't tampered with during shipping. The unintended recipient could have handed it off to a friend to handle the shipping back to the original owner, and that friend could have been bored. Whoever levied the import duties could have also opened the package and been bored enough to start typing in random passwords, before repacking it and shipping it onwards.

Where did "90 times" even come from? I can't find that number documented anywhere in regards to Activation Lock, even googling specifically for that number in case there were anecdotes online.

Is it possible that they swapped the lower case? It's easy to remove.

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