This is my problem ! What do you all think ?

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Brace yourself, welcome to our dilemma

Ok here it goes. This is the problem we have got. My girlfriend has got an iPhone 4. She brought her iPhone 4 from an Orange shop brand new on a contract for 18 months. After about 11 months her sleep / wake button broke and she could not turn the phone on or off !. So we phoned orange and they said we had to take it to the Apple store, Fair enough so we did as they said. We went to an Apple store and we showed them the problem and were happy to replace the phone on site, only problem was they had 0 in stock so we had to go back there the week after. When we went back they took her old phone and replaced it with a new one, transferred the sim card over and tested the calls and worked perfectly.

Ok with me so far ? Good. This is what happened next. About three and a bit months later her phone suddenly started to flash on the screen " Restore needed, you will not be able to make or receive any calls" She was like ?? *** so we reset the phone buy holding the top sleep wake and home button which reset the phone. Still noting, it said restore needed and we could not access the phone what so ever. We had not backed up the phone for a while ! AHHH ... not good, so what I did was take the sim card out, rebooted and hey presto I was able to boot into the phone. I backed up all the data and it was saved to our laptop in iTunes ... Phew. Next I restored the phone to the latest iOS 5.0.1 software, I also made sure the sim card was clean and free of debris. booted the phone up with the sim card fully inserted and new software installed. Went through the simple setup guide and got to the point of selecting a WiFi network and then Activating the phone. That took 1 minute for it to come up and say something like the sim card inserted is not an original orange sim card or something from what I can remember, but after this when I tried it again it said that the sim card could not be detected ! ... Ok next step.

We then went into the Apple Store today and discussed the problem we were having with someone. They said they will do a DFU restore, Fair enough, I personally did not think this was going to make any difference but I let them do what they do best. He came back and said Ive done the restore but I still cant seem to get the phone to activate, he said it may be because the signal in here is bad, which on my iPhone being on 3 was pretty poor also. I explained to him that we have already tried restoring it and we have had no luck in getting the phone to activate even with very very good signal in the area which we were trying to activate the phone. He then said it would cost £119.00 to fix the problem and we did not buy into it. So we said we would go out side wait for a bit and then come back, SO GLAD WE DID !

When we cam back we booked another appointment and waited for about half an hour. A different chap finally called us up to the Genius Bar. The man asked to see the phone, he did another restore out back and had the same problems. We explained to him that they had actually replaced the phone just over three moths ago with apparently a brand new one. He checked his system and said that they had no record of them EVER replacing it ! And we said NO you have replaced it ! We are absolutely sure you did. He said nope you haven't we said YES you have.

So turns out the new phone that they DID replace that we currently have is registered in someone else's name ! What is that all about, and he himself did not know why either but still denied that they replaced it.

Now this is what I think has happened, please correct me if I am wrong but here it goes.

We had a faulty iPhone, we went into the Apple store to get it sorted. They replaced the phone and should have transferred sim card over correctly ?
If they had not done this our old phone could still be registered in my girlfriends name and when her old phone went through getting refurbished for another person, once her old phone had found a new owner and had been activated, it somehow knocked off her current working one and bricked it ?

Does that make any sense ? Please let me know what you think is going on here because its a mess and I am not even sure I have typed this well because Im so angry at the moment ! ...

Any replies would be greatly appreciated, thanks for your time reading my angry post lol

Eagle.
 
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Do you not have paperwork backing up your story? Is the person you dealt with still working there? Have you gone to Orange to simply get a new SIM card and activate the phone properly? There's no reason why this can't get sorted out, whether they replaced it or not. If need be, start barking up the food chain. If the first guy can't fix it, ask for his supervisor. Escalate it as far as it needs to go.
 
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Do you not have paperwork backing up your story? Is the person you dealt with still working there? Have you gone to Orange to simply get a new SIM card and activate the phone properly? There's no reason why this can't get sorted out, whether they replaced it or not. If need be, start barking up the food chain. If the first guy can't fix it, ask for his supervisor. Escalate it as far as it needs to go.

I forgot to mention that, I did speak to orange and got them to send us our a new sim, it came today but we had already left to go to the Apple Store. I would use the new sim but the phone is apparently registered in someone else's name so I was going to wait till tomorrow to see what happens.

I will escalate it further and further if needed, do you think we should have to pay anything ? If its a hardware fault then yes but if its human error ? or their system ? There should be no charge right ?
 
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I forgot to mention that, I did speak to orange and got them to send us our a new sim, it came today but we had already left to go to the Apple Store. I would use the new sim but the phone is apparently registered in someone else's name so I was going to wait till tomorrow to see what happens.

I will escalate it further and further if needed, do you think we should have to pay anything ? If its a hardware fault then yes but if its human error ? or their system ? There should be no charge right ?

You shouldn't have to pay anything, and whether or not it is "registered" in someone else's name (I'm not even sure what that means) is irrelevant. We've handed down two iPhones to my mother-in-law and all she had to do was pop in her SIM and re-activate it in iTunes after wiping it.
 

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