mitraark
Decrepit
I had been told the same thing by the cyber cell dept in the Police, the thieves themselves admit that stolen iphones have to be used for its parts only, the imei info of the phone cannot be changed like they do for other phones hence if even if they factory reset the phone somehow it will be trackable.Samsung top end models & Apple iphones have hardware encryption that cannot be bypassed by any publicly known means(hence the FBI reward to hacker group for unlocking iphone of that Pakistani US terrorist couple using a zero day vulnerability) so if password/screen lock/pattern is not known that one cannot factory reset/format/modify boot loader of those phones to install custom rom/original rom again to use those phones. Only option is to dismantle the phone & then sell parts as spare.