Planning to Get an iPhone on Verizon Prepaid? Check the New Fine Print
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If you’re thinking of picking up a new iPhone on one of Verizon’s prepaid brands, be prepared to stick around for a while. While the carrier was previously required to unlock phones after 60 days, it’s recently gotten authorization to change that — and it’s wasting no time in taking advantage of that new freedom.
While customers who are directly on Verizon don’t seem to be affected yet, The Verge reports that those on its sub-brands — including Visible, TracFone, Straight Talk, and Total Wireless — will need to pay for 365 days of service before they’ll be allowed to switch their phone to a different network.
The policy change was first spotted by DroidLife, which notes that since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave Verizon the green light to drop its 60-day device unlocking policy last week, the carrier is now free to “basically create whatever unlock policy it wanted.”
The new policy, which is outlined at tfwunlockpolicy.com, applies to Straight Talk, Net10, Clearway, Total Wireless, Tracfone, SimpleMobile, SafeLink, and WalmartFamilyMobile. It states that effective January 20, phones on “Verizon Value” services will not be eligible for unlocking until the customer “365 days of paid and active service” has elapsed. While those 365 days don’t have to be continuous, they will be paused if you stop paying for service at any time, and buying out your contract doesn’t buy you an early unlock. The only faint silver lining here is that phones activated on or before January 19 on the Verizon network are still grandfathered into the 60-day rule.
On top of that, phones will only be unlocked upon customer request, which is a change from its previous policy, where they’d be automatically unlocked after 60 days had elapsed. It’s an important distinction, as many folks will wait a year and assume they’re free to switch, only to find their new SIM or eSIM rejected because they failed to go through Verizon’s unlocking procedure.
The only exception here appears to be for deployed military personnel, where Verizon Value promises to unlock phones upon request — but only if those members have “relocation orders outside of the Verizon Value coverage area.” That means postings to other bases within the United States aren’t likely to qualify as Verizon Value brands utilize Verizon’s nationwide network, making it difficult for domestic service members to prove they are ‘outside’ the coverage zone.
This is essentially a return to the old policy that was in place prior to November 23, 2021. Phones purchased prior to that date required 12 months of paid service before they’d be eligible for unlocking. The new policy lists this as a more specific 365 days, but the limitation is essentially the same for most practical purposes.
The policy change notably applies only to those phones that are activated on the Verizon network. Since Verizon Value brands operated as MVNOs, they also offers some plans on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, for which they’ve never offered 60-day unlocking.
Verizon received a waiver from the FCC last week to lift a 60-day unlocking requirement that had originally been imposed as a result of its 2020 acquisition of TracFone, which effectively became the umbrella for the Verizon Value brands.
In a press release, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr described the move as being about preventing fraud and criminal activity that often stems from smartphones that are too easily unlocked and can be used as “burner phones” for nefarious purposes or simply stolen and more easily exported to places Russia, China, and Cuba.
Sophisticated criminal networks have exploited the FCC’s handset unlocking policies to carry out criminal acts — including transnational handset trafficking schemes and facilitating broader criminal enterprises like drug running and human smuggling. By waiving a regulation that incentivized bad actors to target one particular carrier’s handsets for theft, we now have a uniform industry standard that can help stem the flow of handsets into the black market.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr
While Carr suggests this is a return to a “uniform industry standard,” likely referring to the CTIA trade group’s Consumer Code for Wireless Service that sets a voluntary one-year limit, it’s worth noting that AT&T’s policies are still an outlier here, allowing the unlocking of prepaid phones after six months.
All of the US carriers will also refuse to unlock any phone that’s been reported as lost, stolen, or involved with fraud, regardless of any other time limits. Granted, there are likely some that slip through those cracks, but some argue that these stricter unlocking policies are more about preserving carriers’ bottom lines than actually reducing criminal activity.
Meanwhile in Canada: A Tale of Two Regulators
The wireless carrier landscape in the Great White North provides an interesting counterpoint here, as Bell Mobility recently tried to use a similar excuse to justify a 60-day unlocking policy in violation of the country’s wireless code.
The Canadian Radio Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — Canada’s equivalent of the FCC — has prohibited the sale of locked phones since 2017 under its Wireless Code.
Despite this, Bell began locking smartphones sold by it and its sub-brand, Virgin Plus, in April 2025. This was ostensibly to address robberies from its stores, but the carrier had actually been stocking locked phones since 2018 as the Wireless Code only requires the phone to be unlocked at the point of sale, which Bell was doing. However, last year’s change saw the carrier add a 60-day unlock window even after the phone was sold.
As MobileSyrup’s Jonathan Lamont reported in December, the CRTC didn’t take too kindly to this, sending a stern letter to Bell, telling it that the Wireless Code is “clear” on the matter and ordering it to stop selling locked phones “immediately.”
This came despite the fact that Bell wasn’t preventing customers from unlocking their phones — at least not deliberately. It still claimed it would unlock phones for any customers who contacted the carrier or even used an online tool to do so, thereby believing it was still complying with the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. The CRTC disagreed, although it probably didn’t help that more than a few Bell customers found the unlocking process didn’t work as advertised.
That’s a significant win for consumers rights in Canada that stands in stark contrast to the FCC policies that are seeming more anti-consumer than ever these days. It’s an open question whether a stricter unlocking policy actually reduces smartphone theft, but if features like Apple’s Activation Lock still aren’t deterrents to phone trafficking, then it’s had to believe that a carrier lock will make much of a difference.
