meh

So, now that I've noticed my old boss at Geauga Phone Repair/iDevice Wholesale has blocked me on Facebook, let me make a bunch of information public he probably wouldn't want public.

- Why was I fired
I was missing a ton of days of work largely due to health issues, car issues and a fellow employee I really didn't get along with. This does mostly fall on me. October 2022, I had a kidney stone show up. I missed nearly 2.5 weeks of work because even with pain meds, I couldn't drive to work with it. The pain was insane. 0/10, do not recommend. I was fired via text message when I woke up with the flu on Dec 23, 2022 around 9am. I did admittedly miss a lot of work, but after talking to many people about this, majority agree that in their experience, they would have sat down with me, had a conversation and tried to figure out how to make it work. Also, owner of this shop is moderator, admin or good friends with majority of the tech item sales groups. I was banned from ALL OF THEM within a month of no longer working at the shop. Why? What's the point of that?

- My final paycheck
It took nearly 2 MONTHS to get my final paycheck, and even then, I was only sent about 75% of it. I was under the table for nearly 2 years at 15 an hour when first hired, 17 when I left. I was told 2 years in a row, "just don't file your taxes, I won't report your income" by the business owner, so I didn't. I haven't done taxes since 2020. All employees are under the table last I was aware. "My tax guy is great, don't worry about it." probably a scum bag too.

- Some fellow employees and scummy people I worked with
The tech industry is full of shitty scummy do anything to make a buck style people. We had an employee for a short time basically pull an "Exit Scam" on us, by having a buyer send the payment for items to a personal payment app account rather than the stores (still on my friends list on fb). Another person just straight up stuck us with their inventory of items that owed the owner of the shop over 200k USD, and then had the audacity to ask for it back (still on my friends list on fb, would love to know your side of the story). And there's just a lot of laws broken, money laundering and really uneducated people in the used tech community as a whole, that make me pretty happy I'm actually out of this shop. Honestly from this side of things, I'm not surprised there's companies lobbying AGAINST 3rd party right to repair. There's nearly more bad actors than there are good actors. Also, lets mention the person I didn't get along with. He was hired from another company, who straight up told us they were having "operational issues" within the company and looking for someone new. We hired their operations manager. WHY?!? They were already having issues with operations, and when he came into the shop, there was so much made worse. There was no good system in place for "oh you sold that? sorry, so did I." And often it'd just be "tough shit for your buyer, I'm shipping it" when it would often sell for less through that person. This guy was giving out deals like candy. A Samsung or Google Pixel device that could be sold in a matter of an hour, with fees, on ebay would still profit +100 compared to what this guy would sell it for to someone else. Not his money buying the items, and the owner was blind to this. When bringing it up, was often brushed off because owner and this guy were basically butt humpin buddies.

- How were we getting our inventry
Very little of our inventory was "off the street" public buys/walk-in's. Majority of the inventory came from a business in Solon, OH called PC Parts (jkcomputerparts on ebay). We also purchased Macbooks, iMac's and Mac Mini's from the National Institute of Health. They buy/receive e-waste on pallets from places like Amazon, Target, bestbuy and more. We would mainly buy Phone pallets, Tablet pallets and macbook stuff. We did also have access to their entire inventory of itemized computer parts.
iPhone 7 and newer: $40 per device
iPhone 6 and older: $30 per device
Android: $30 per device, except samsungs, I believe samsung was $40 per device
Mac Mini's: around 80 for 2014 or older
Macbooks: huge range but generally 40% less than what we'd sell them for. Majority ended up as parts only.

- iCloud locked stuff
iCloud Locked means the device needs the original Apple account associated with it before a reset to login in order to finish setup. This is an Anti-Theft function added by Apple to iOS. With iCloud locked items, we had buyers in China for most of these. Majority of USA sold iCloud locked devices end up in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. This is the tech mecha of China. Hundreds of thousands of iCloud locked devices get funneled through this part of China per year. We didn't generally *knowingly* sell stolen items, or buy them. The iCloud locked stuff we received was generally some form of warranty claim we pulled off a pallet. There are ways around iCloud locking, but we generally didn't do it.

- Google Locked stuff
Google Locking, aka FRP (factory reset protection), is similar to iCloud lock, although it doesn't work very well. Its fairly easy to get around with free public tools, and we did this a lot. Again, we received these devices generally off the pallets we purchased, not stolen purchased. No big deal. If we couldn't remove the google lock, we sold it as google locked to other shops or via ebay.

- eBay sales
Ebay sucks, so does Swappa as far as selling on there. Fees are high, company often sides with the buyer and seller loses out on money and whatever item they sold, and there's scummy scammers who use freight forwarders to ship items. Don't use ebay to sell things. it sucks.

- Repairs, and customer damaged devices
We did have a form that customers filled out before every repair was attempted. This form was basically to keep track of a customers device, the history of why it was currently there and how to contact them if needed. If a device was damaged during repair (it happens, no ones perfect), often was directed to lie to the customer, explain the damage during the repair was because of something THEY BROKE, and get them to buy a used phone from our inventory. This is scummy. In my experience, people are ok with honesty, even if its something negative. Yes, you're going to once in awhile have that person who bitches you out, but frankly, you made their stuff worse, so, you kinda deserve it.

- Warranty Frauding
This was done A LOT with Apple, Samsung and Google Pixel's. Apple got to the point that they'd detect it, owner would lie about how the devices were received and used, change emails, use other people's addresses and phone numbers, make up names, and I have witnessed fake receipt generators at least being talked about, not sure if ever actually used. With Samsung and Google Pixels, it was generally a far easier process to exploit. Simply register the device to your account, put in the imei, describe the damage and mail it off. Pay a deductible sometimes, get it back and it would be reset with no Google Lock and repaired. Again, lying about how we received the devices IF we had to explain it. Warranty frauding is illegal, and its not just this shop that heavily abuses it. This means on average if a device was under warranty, we were paying at most $40 plus deductible to make a device like new. Even then, a lot of times it was no deductible.

- All in all, I'd never recommend working for or buying from Geauga Phone Repair/iDevice Wholesale. Scummy company with a scummy owner who hires scummy people and often breaks laws just to make a bit more money on something. Go elsewhere.