Thursday, May 21, 2015

Where the iCloud took me

A month ago I bought two IPod Touch 5G devices from a guy. Apparently they were iCloud locked. That is when this journey started. As the devices were both lost and erased, I couldn't find any information regarding the original owner, the only little thing the original owner left behind and wasn't erasable, was a small engraving on the back of both iPods, "nil tools for people". That lead me nowhere...or the time being.
Spent the next few days looking for a bypass for the Activation Lock page, tried lots of stuff, talked to a whole bunch of people, the only helpful thing was Ighor's http://iclouddnsbypass.com website. Ending up contacting Apple but with no results. Using some help from a fellow Romanian, and iTools, I managed to find out that the iPods are from Japan! Yeah, they traveled a looooong way to Romania, and they belonged to a wealthy software engineer in Japan! CEO of Nil Software Corp. That was a huge discovery. The search took me 3 weeks, talking to the police, talking to Apple Care, countless people on Facebook and Twitter, and now all I had to do was to get in touch with this Japanese genius. I have sent him an e-mail in a lame Google translated Japanese with no response; I called at his company, but the guys which responded only spoke Japanese, and I didn't understand a single thing; I ended up sending them also an e-mail with a picture of one of the iPods; still no response that day. Last night I have contacted Apple again, talked to a very helpful guy, explained him what I did so far, and he finally helped me get in contact with the owner, he told me exactly what to say in the e-mail and forward him an e-mail Apple sent me; he said he will do the same. Well I followed his advice and I got an answer in about 1 hour from Mr. Masao (this is his name), he told me that the iPods were stolen from him last summer in Belgium, he was such a nice guy, he asked me how much I have paid for them, and if I could sent them back to him and he will give me the money I invested back. That sounds good, but I got attached to these two poor "babies", and sending them using Romania's Postal Services doesn't inspire me confidence, it happened me once to not get the amount of money I was supposed to get in an envelope, because someone apparently has snatched 100€ from it lol. So I proposed him to sell them to me, I can pay him the rest of the money he asks for, an that way we can be both content. I think he is concerned about privacy, because we all know iCloud stores lots of personal data, that's why he insisted into sending them back, but they were both formatted in iTunes so there's no trace of his information on them anymore. Hope we can get to an agreement. I'll keep you posted. So far was the most interesting experience I had in my entire life! Searching for something unknown, find about belonging to distant lands, talking to important people, this is kind of overwhelming :)