How to unlock an Iphone

I have sat for over 3 hours on the phone with customer support and advanced technical support and have been hung up on 3 times when the agent said they needed to put me on hold. I am thankfully not an AT&T wireless customer. I  purchased a device from Bestbuy in Dec of 2018. This device was supposed to have been an unlocked IPhone. Unfortunately, I found out today that was not the case. I used Cricket wireless which is a subsidiary of AT&T which explains why the device worked fine when using my cricket SIM card. Today I traveled to Australia, and when trying to use a Vodafone SIM card, my device said that it was locked and I would need to contact my carrier. I contacted Cricket and they said they could not unlock it. I found through a third party site that AT&T was the reason my device was locked. After following the steps on AT&T's website to unlock a device and waiting for a few hours I decided to call customer support since I never received a confirmation email for my request.

First AT&T support call, I was told that they could not verify I owned the device and that I would need to get cricket on the line to verify. I did, but when I tried to join the call between AT&T and Cricket together, The first rep from AT&T hung up after about 3 minutes of being on hold. 

Second support call. I now had a Cricket rep on the phone to verify that I was a subscriber and used that device. We walked through the same steps as with the first person and the Cricket rep verified that I was using the device. Eventually, the customer support rep from ATT said that the would try to submit a new request and that I should hold. They hung up after about a minute. 

The Third support call lasted 159 minutes. This call went to a likely southern east coast based call center. The support rep Katrina, walked through the same process as the previous reps, and the Cricket rep was still on the call to verify. Katrina said there was nothing AT&T could do to unlock the phone. Since the phone is locked to AT&T's network I asked who else could possibly unlock this device. She said she didn't know but there was nothing she could do since I did not have an account with AT&T. She could not submit an unlock request, and she could not directly unlock the device. I asked to speak to a supervisor and she said there was none that could speak to me since I did not have an AT&T account. The Cricket rep spoke up here and asked if AT&T was telling me that they were refusing to escalate to a manager or supervisor. The AT&T rep said yes. We proceded to go back and forth for about 45 more minutes until eventually, I asked enough times that she was able to find a supervisor named Paul to help and take my call. 

Paul tried most of the same steps as the three other reps but was unable to get anywhere with unlocking the phone or using the only form. He contacted tech support 3 times, but they each gave him the same answer that there was nothing they could do without an account. I know that a sim lock can be overridden, a few days ago a news article was released where someone had been bribing AT&T employees to unlock devices that were ineligible for years. Eventually, Paul was nearing the end of his shift, I asked if he could pass me to advanced tech support because we both agreed that if anyone should be able to override the lock it should be them.

I eventually got a person from advanced tech support on the line. I explained the situation again. He tried to have me walk through the same steps as the earlier reps and eventually said I would have to wait at least 24 hours before I could request the sim lock again. I asked if there was a way for him to see the status of my request. He said that they cannot. I asked if he could ask a supervisor or manager if there was an override. He said he would look and placed me on hold for about 3 minutes. 

Then he hung up. And now I still have a $1200 paperweight because ATT will not unlock my device.