Imei problem on original phone purchased from Apple by myself

[Clevans]

I tried to upgrade my iPhone 7 Plus last night. We got to the final step of printing the paperwork at Apple and got this error. We called AT&T and were told that the imei was correct in their system. We called back again when it still wouldn’t work and I was told I could only upgrade at an AT&T store. So I went down to the AT&T store and got the error that my phone wasn’t eligible to be turned in through next and I had to either pay this one off or pay full price for a new phone in order to upgrade. The employees had never seen this. Any ideas? The employees at Apple are stumped. It’s the original phone I purchased at the Apple store last April. The only thing they could see was a random case in my phone history that is in Chinese. They are thinking that maybe there was a problem with a number entered incorrectly during production and it was fixed after and that is why we are getting the error. They opened a technical engineering case for it. The employee thought maybe they will just swap it out at the Genius Bar which would give me a new imei that is clear and then I could upgrade

 

[chscag]

If the IMEI is messed up due to some input error then it would be best to have the phone swapped out at the Genius Bar and then proceed with the new phone and IMEI. A bad or incorrect IMEI is difficult to straighten out otherwise.

 

[Clevans]

If the IMEI is messed up due to some input error then it would be best to have the phone swapped out at the Genius Bar and then proceed with the new phone and IMEI. A bad or incorrect IMEI is difficult to straighten out otherwise.

That sounds like the easiest fix. It’s a shame I’ll be exchanging a phone that works perfectly for a phone I’m just going to send right to AT&T and not even use