Found Cell Phones...worthless?

I own a bar in Columbus Ohio and I find at least one cell phone nearly every week. Most of the time I am able to find there owners but somtimes I cannot. Is there a way to sell these phones? I am sure they were activated at some point, does this make them usless.

They are nice looking phones, I hate to just throw them out, what should I do?

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well if u know the carrier u should find out about trading them in..

Well at the moment I have two sprint samsung phones. One is the newer Sanyo version 8100, the other is the A500 sprint version...

any suggestions?

The problem is that if the phones have been lost it is likely they have been blacklisted to stop them being re-used. Check the networks they are with and check the IMEI number with them. The major networks can effectively stop batches of stolen or lost phones from operation. Check the link below:-

http://www.unlockme.co.uk/blacklist.html

CosmoKramer1 if you find phones, i would be gladly to take them off you all the time. because i can use the phones for parts or housings. this is my email address [email protected]
please contact me if you willing to ship them. i live in toronto i will pay for shipping. i would love to take any gsm phones u find off you so contact me.

Originally posted by tomsongsuk
The problem is that if the phones have been lost it is likely they have been blacklisted to stop them being re-used. Check the networks they are with and check the IMEI number with them. The major networks can effectively stop batches of stolen or lost phones from operation. Check the link below:-

http://www.unlockme.co.uk/blacklist.html

The poster mentioned that they were "Sprint Samsung" phones. I don't know much about US carriers, but I think Sprint is CDMA, in which case they would have ESNs, not IMEIs. I know, semantics.....

Anyway, since they're CDMA phones, I would say you would probably have even less luck trying to reactivate the phones and using them (unless US CDMA carriers allow foreign ESNs to be registered on their networks...actually I think Verizon allows this).