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right, but the stolen phones get sold in other countries where the carriers don't care if the phone was stolen but care that someone is spending money on their service.

And we cant own our phones due to that?

There is a surprising number of carriers in the world that don't care if you're using a stolen phone.

Not surprisingly, stolen phones tend to end up in those locations.

I have never seen this happen.

I have however experienced that a ISP will write to you because you have a faulty modem (some Huawei device) and asks you to not use it anymore.

Visit eBay and search for "blocked IMEI" or variants. There are plenty of used phones which are IMEI locked due to either: reported lost, reported stolen, failed to make payments, etc.

All offers seem to be from the US.

I the lines between IMEI banning or blacklisting and the modern unlocking techniques they use have been blurred a little bit and so some carriers and some manufacturers don't really want to do or spend time doing the IMEI stuff and would prefer to just handle it all via their own unlocking and locking mechanisms.

With vulnerable FW, you can change IMEIs. Hence this kind of rollback prevention updates.