What Does A Bad ESN Mean for An iPhone and How to Fix It

Every iPhone has its unique electronic serial number (ESN) since it is being activated. Though the ESN number does not plays an important role during your daily usage, it is still essential to keep your iPhone running. Therefore, once the iPhone is blacklisted, some people even do not know where to find and what the bad ESN means. Therefore, this article mainly talks about the bad ESN meaning and how to fix a bad ESN in easy ways. You can locate the specific bad ESN iPhone fix part with the help of following descripting titles below.

Part 1: What Does A Bad ESN Mean and Its Caused Reasons

Know reasons for bad ESN causes listed in certain situations, with which you can find the best solution to clear bad ESN on iPhone.

1. What Does An Bad ESN Mean

Actually, the ESN number is the unique number to identify every phone to a CDMA network. In another word, an ESN number can help you distinguish the phone of the same types by using the serial numbers. If you wanna to find where the ESN number is, just look the back of your battery, with both decimal and hexadecimal versions expressed. The ESN number is also the tool to activate the phone with a carrier, to replace the SIM card. Therefore, you will fail to call anyone because of its bad ESN.

2. Reasons to Cause Bad ESN

As the above descriptions mentioned, an ESN number is particular to each phone, so ESNs will not expire. However, it will turns to bad because of following three main causes.

Reason 1: Unpaid Account Balances

It is because the former owner of the phone does not pay off the end date of the remaining balance. Thus, the carrier flag and blacklist the ESN. Sometimes, the bad ESN will even stop you from activate another carrier.

Reason 2: Phone Activated Already

If your phone is still active in the former account, then it is undoubtedly that there will be the bad ESN error occurs when you attempt the new phone.

Reason 3: Phone Got Stolen or Lost

Once people lost or phone got stolen, the common way is to post to the carrier. And the carrier will flag and block the smart phone from activation. Therefore, if you bought a bad ESN iPhone from eBay or else where, check whether it is the stolen iPhone first.

Part 2: How to Fix A Bad ESN for iPhone

So how to save the iPhone bad ESN if your smart phone got blacklisted? Or is there anything to do to clear bad ESN since the main reason has been detected. There are six main solutions you can apply, to do bad ESN cleaning.

Method 1: Ask for Refund from the Seller

If you bought the ESN error phone, no matter from online or offline retailers, you can ask for a replacement or refund. And Amazon and eBay have refund policies to protect your rights, as well as other platforms with 30-day money back guarantee.

Method 2: Contact The Carrier

You can contact the carrier to ask for reasons why the bad ESN occurred on your phone. If you are just the original owner of the phone, then this method may suits you better, with more information you can provide. For the outstanding account balance, pay it to clear bad ESN away.

Method 3: Get The IMEI or Clean Bad ESN

It depends on your accurate carrier, with which you may remove your IMEI from the blacklist with related requests, to fix a bad ESN of your iPhone.

Method 4: Tear iPhone to Sell as Spare Parts

For old versions of iPhone, which may has worked for a long time with scratches or other damages, maybe tear them apart and sell separately will be the good way, of the logic board, screen, dock connector and etc.

Method 5: Use The Bad ESN iPhone as iPod

The bad ESN iPhone can serve as iPod too, with which you can watch YouTube videos, download music, play games and do many other activities except for making phone calls. But Skype can work as alternative phone call maker as well.

Method 6: Flash Your iPhone with A Different Carrier

If you do not mind to change carriers, then you are able to flash bad ESN iPhone to AT&T, Sprint and other carriers, to get the functional phone again. Sometimes you may need to get 3G connection instead of 4G.

Summary

You can check bad ESN reasons and know solutions from the mentioned above. There are many similar question on the forums, asking "Can a bad ESN be saved", "Is there anything I can do about bad ESN" and etc. Come and read this article carefully, and you will not regret for two or three minutes you have spent.