I updated to a new phone and am selling it on eBay.
I’ve never sold an iPhone specifically.
I’ve said very clearly I will only ship in the US due to problems I’ve had in the past selling electronics (it took forever to clear customs and the person complained, etc. It’s simply not worth the hassle).
So why are people, specifically foreigners asking for the serial number?
I gave it to someone and now I am suspecting maybe that was a bad thing to have done considering the amount of requests.
Does anybody know?
Edit to add: I’m selling the old phone, a 3Gs.
I have done a bit of research into this and the serial number seems to be a benign thing to give away, using it you can determine the year, week and factory of manufacture which may be handy information for someone looking to buy but I can’t see how they could do harm with it (I may be wrong on this). The serial number can also, apparently, be a good indicator of whether the phone has been refurbished by Apple and re-deployed as a replacement.
Beyond that all I could find is that the serial number can be a guide to determining what sort of jailbreak options are available for the device. This seems a likely motivation to me, people may be looking for older 3GS phones for the purposes of jailbreaking it and putting it on another network.
I had read some message boards that said it was no issue and others that made it sound like it was a bad idea. I knew someone here would be able to answer.