IMEI modification

[loki4lyfe]

I am opening this thread as a discussion on the legality so administrators if you would please give it a chance I would appreciate it.

Every forum on modding or jail breaking will have the question posed as to whether or not you can change an IMEI on a mobile device. There are obvious issues concerning this practice as it could be used to activate stolen hardware or illegally rerouting calls. These are obvious concerns with providing anyone with the necessary information as to how this could be done.

The problem is that there seems to be a lot of people stating that the practice of changing an IMEI is illegal in most countries and can provide a legislative base for their statements. As far as I can find there is no such legislature in the US. US laws tend not to be as restrictive as many other countries concerning things that have a "potential" to be used illegally. There are perfectly moral reasons that you may want to change an IMEI number on a device that belongs to you.

As an example there are many people in the US who would like to use a smartphone for what it offers them in either productivity or media without ever using a data plan. I for one see it as an extreme irritation that all major and many minor cell phone companies in the US require a data plan just to use a smart phone on their system. There is no legal reasoning for this and there is no reason that their system hardware requires any more effort to send a phone call to a smartphone as a dumb phone. Most if not all smartphones have a way to completely disable any data flow from or to the hosting company and therefore there is no chance of even having overages accidentally if there was no data plan. Service providers also have the ability to disable data on any account and all that requires is a couple keystrokes. They refuse to allow these services because they are greedy. Changing an IMEI number on a device that is neither contracted from a company, nor leased from a company for the purposed of being allowed access to making phone calls and receiving text messages without the "required" data plan is a perfectly moral use of said practice.

I am not requesting that iPD allow open discussion of how to change the IMEI number as due to the illegal use of this practice it would put them in a bad position but I would like to hear if anyone has any actual legal base, with references, as to its legality in the US.

I am very tired of big corporations charging ridiculous amounts of money for services just so they can increase their profit margin on a product or service that they already profited greatly on. This is a perfect example of how as most companies increases in size and power they begin to take advantage of their customers instead of continuing to serve the people who built them.

[geoca]

there would be more to the matter.......like when the baseband dies and you wanna change it up.i myself have an iphone 4 baseband on stock and i am thinking to change it on the next phone.what if i wanna write back the original imei on the phone.or changing the basebands it changes the imei directly through hardware and is it allowed or not?many things to think about

[captainkirks]

There is no reason to change an imei unless your trying to cheat someone. If you change the imei to avoid paying data charges your stealing data from them. Big company your still trying to cheap them. Its best for forums to stay away from imei cloning on public threads.