Verizon sent a person a refurbished phone with MDM, then remotely wiped his data

The unexpected restarts and factory resets that Collery performed may be evidence that Verizon is using its MDM to send instructions to more devices. “When you have a lot of phones like this and you have MDM, you just send instructions to all the phones,” Quintin said.

If Verizon has a policy to periodically wipe phones, maybe it was “time for the policy to go into effect and that’s why his phone was wiped,” Quintin said.

Verizon acknowledged the error in a letter to the FCC

Collery’s information was removed from the phone, and it was discovered that the backups of his Google and Samsung accounts were not as recent as he thought. Collery, who works in health care, said in a phone interview, “I lost everything. Phone calls, messages, videos, documents, photos, everything from patient information to the last video I have of my grandmother before she died. Everything within a few years for some reason has gone from all my data, and everything on the phone has been deleted.

Dissatisfied with the response from Verizon support, Collery made a Reddit post and later reached out to Ars. He shared documents with us, including a letter Verizon filed with the Federal Communications Commission after filing a complaint with the FCC.

Verizon’s letter to the FCC, dated April 2, said Collery was mistakenly sent a store display instead of the correct phone for a paying customer.

“We acknowledge the seriousness of the error that caused Mr. Collery to receive a device that was identified as a ‘demo phone,’ which was found to have a Mobile Device Management (MDM) registration associated with Verizon. The violation of the policy has been submitted for internal investigation,” Verizon’s communications department told the FCC.