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According to the newspaper Du Dimanche, Free Mobile would have done a bit of housekeeping in its unscrupulous users who rented smartphones via its dedicated service without taking care to return them at the end of the agreed period.
Recall that Free offers a smartphone rental service that allows everyone to enjoy a terminal for an initial amount with monthly payments and a commitment over 24 months. Except that at the end of the contract, the user has no choice but to return the terminal (and possibly to go to another location), no purchase option being provided.
However, some users managed to get around the system by not restoring smartphones while avoiding invoicing … This forced Free to launch a large operation at the beginning of the month: the remote blocking of non-returned terminals.
Free remains the owner of the terminals and can therefore implement a lock that locks the terminal, no longer allowing it to connect to any GSM network (neither FREE nor any other, anywhere in the world), which makes smartphones almost unusable.
The problem is that for 3 years that the situation lasts, some of these terminals have changed owners. Whether it is the sale of second hand to private or via second hand specialist shops, some users had the bad surprise of seeing themselves with an unusable smartphone yet bought in trusted shops.
According to the JDD, Free would have blocked on no less than 300,000 smartphones since the beginning of this month. The situation is complex since the owners of these smartphones did not know its origin for the most part. The blocking is therefore a surprise and the remedies are limited: Free invites to contact the resellers to review the black listing on a case by case basis.
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