Or as Wade stated above, meddling around with the OS. I have a hardware dongle used for flashing and unlocking Samsung mobile phones that also can repair IMEI's if things go wrong. You might want to check out some mobile phone unlockers in the service section of Trademe to see if they have anything that can repair IMEI's in Samsung mobile phones.
quickymart: They don't as far as I know...otherwise what would be the point of the IMEI?
They don't.
There is probably a 99.9% chance the handsets are stolen. With EMEI blocking the norm around the world the only way to flick off stolen/dodgy handsets is to break them so they restore to a generic test IMEI which would allow them to work on networks that haven't blocked this generic IMEI.
If you bought the phones of someone in Australia you can check the status of the phones here http://www.amta.org.au/pages/amta/Check.the.Status.of.your.Handset the original IMEI of the phones will be on a sticker under the battery, if that sticker is not there then the chances of that being stolen has just got higher.
quickymart: They don't as far as I know...otherwise what would be the point of the IMEI?
They don't.
There is probably a 99.9% chance the handsets are stolen. With EMEI blocking the norm around the world the only way to flick off stolen/dodgy handsets is to break them so they restore to a generic test IMEI which would allow them to work on networks that haven't blocked this generic IMEI.
The SGS2 has a separate partition (/efs) where it stored IMEI data, etc. None of the official firmware updates touch this partition, and all of the community-created ROMs I've seen steer clear of touching /efs in case they corrupt it.
The IMEI is supposed to be unique to each mobile device, and is programmed in the factory. If all of your SGS2s have the same number then it can only be because the /efs partition has been explicitly updated. As sbiddle said above, this means that there's a 99.9% chance your phones were stolen and have had the IMEI changed in order to stop them being blocked.
It's possible for someone with the right software (e.g. GeekGuy) to set the correct IMEI for each phone, according to what's on the official sticker. This will give each phone a unique identity again, and should allow it to be used (assuming the original IMEI numbers aren't also blocked).
I know someone that used a code that has done a hard reset on a Samsung E3210 locked to Optus. It unlocked it but now he has all zero's for his IMEI, apparently it works fine but it will be interesting to see for how long.
quickymart: They don't as far as I know...otherwise what would be the point of the IMEI?
They don't.
There is probably a 99.9% chance the handsets are stolen. With EMEI blocking the norm around the world the only way to flick off stolen/dodgy handsets is to break them so they restore to a generic test IMEI which would allow them to work on networks that haven't blocked this generic IMEI.
The SGS2 has a separate partition (/efs) where it stored IMEI data, etc. None of the official firmware updates touch this partition, and all of the community-created ROMs I've seen steer clear of touching /efs in case they corrupt it.
The IMEI is supposed to be unique to each mobile device, and is programmed in the factory. If all of your SGS2s have the same number then it can only be because the /efs partition has been explicitly updated. As sbiddle said above, this means that there's a 99.9% chance your phones were stolen and have had the IMEI changed in order to stop them being blocked.
It's possible for someone with the right software (e.g. GeekGuy) to set the correct IMEI for each phone, according to what's on the official sticker. This will give each phone a unique identity again, and should allow it to be used (assuming the original IMEI numbers aren't also blocked).
This is correct.
There was a stage when new firmware for the s2 was coming out (beta from samsung) the guys at xda got there hands on it and started making their own firmware, however a few did something to the efs and when people loaded the custom firmware it did changed the IMEI numbers on a few handsets. Any "custom" or "samsung supplied" firmware loaded after this kept the new "fake" 004999010640000 number.
The only people that could restore back to normal were the people that did backups of the efs folder which had their real IMEI info in it.
There would be a few phones around with this IMEI, if 1 was stolen then the IMEI would be banned by vodafone and killed all the other phones reporting that IMEI on the network.
Nothing you can really do to fix it unless you have the correct IMEI and someone supplies a modd'ed copy of a efs folders etc.
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