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IMEI Check for Phone Insurance Claims: What Your Insurer Needs

4 min readUpdated 6/1/2025

IMEI and Phone Insurance: What to Know Before and After a Claim

Your phone's IMEI is the single most important piece of information for any insurance claim — it is how insurers verify which device is being claimed, confirm it belongs to the policyholder, check its current status, and process replacement. Here's what you need to know before you need to make a claim.

Why Insurers Need Your IMEI

  • Device ownership verification: The IMEI is the unique identifier that ties a specific physical device to an account, invoice, or carrier registration
  • Pre-claim status check: Insurers check whether the IMEI is already blacklisted, recently activated, or shows signs of fraud before processing a claim
  • Fraud prevention: Insurance fraud involving phones (reporting a working phone as stolen, then keeping it) is detected by cross-referencing IMEI status with carrier network activity data
  • Replacement provisioning: The replacement device is registered to your account using the IMEI

Record Your IMEI Before You Need It

The worst time to find your IMEI is after your phone is lost or stolen — because the easiest ways to find it require having the phone. Record your IMEI now:

  1. Dial *#06# on your phone and write down or screenshot the IMEI
  2. Find it in Settings → General → About (iPhone) or Settings → About Phone (Android)
  3. Find it on the original box (printed on the barcode label)
  4. Find it on your carrier account online — most carrier accounts list all devices with their IMEIs
  5. Run a check at imeicheckpro.com and save the result PDF

What Happens to Your Old IMEI After an Insurance Claim

When you make a successful insurance claim for a lost or stolen phone, the insurer (or their fulfilment partner, like Asurion in the US) registers the original IMEI as claimed. The original device's IMEI may be:

  • Blacklisted immediately (for stolen claims) to prevent the original from being used by a thief
  • Left active but flagged (for lost claims) for a period in case it is found

Important: If you find your phone after making a claim and want to keep both it and the replacement, contact your insurer immediately. The original IMEI may be blacklisted and need to be cleared by the insurer.

The Insurance Fraud Scam That Affects Innocent Buyers

One of the most common ways innocent people receive blacklisted phones is through insurance fraud. Someone files a claim on their phone (reports it stolen), receives a replacement, then sells the "stolen" original. The original IMEI gets blacklisted when the insurance claim processes, days or weeks after the buyer purchased it.

Protection: run a premium IMEI check at imeicheckpro.com close to the time of purchase — not weeks before — since blacklisting can happen after a clean initial check.

IMEI and Contents Insurance / Homeowner's Insurance

If claiming a phone theft under homeowner's or contents insurance (rather than a dedicated phone insurance policy), you will need to provide:

  • Original proof of purchase showing IMEI
  • Police crime reference number
  • IMEI report showing the device was yours and its status at time of theft

A premium IMEI check report from imeicheckpro.com serves as verifiable IMEI documentation and can be attached to your insurance claim.