My son used an ASUS Live L1 for about 3 years, and then we bought a new smartphone 1 year ago. Cool, except that the e-mail address he registered with Live L1, no longer exists, has been permanently deleted. His newest phone was stolen, and we took the L1 to set it up again. Only... Google wants him to log in to the original email (FRP Lock) that no longer exists.

How absurd, the L1 cell phone was never marked as stolen, and now we are unable to use our property. Is there a way for my son to convince google that the phone is his?

Microsoft, Google, Apple... They give the impression that people give money and use devices as if they were a "favor".

Wouldn't a factory reset work?

There should be a combination of volume buttons being held down while booting up that will bring up the boot menu, then there should be a factory reset option. Obviously you'll lose everything in the phone, but since you didn't use it for a while, it might not matter.

After the factory reset, you should be asked to connect the phone with a new google account I think

Never tried this though, that's just the theory

U might be able to verify ur identity by providing driverlicense/passport etc.

@Hazarth i did try factory reset once. They still wanted google account. Probably because ppl could steal phones and use them otherways. Also custom software prob wont work if dev settings are off :[

@joewilliams007 Exactly. The account was deleted by us at the time he already had the newest smartphone (parental affairs), and it was carried out by the computer. Now Google asks me something impossible and a company decides to make a cell phone useless.

I understand all the problems involving theft, but at least here in Brazil, the way to definitely block a device is by IMEI, and not a policy of a company that thinks it's God.

We've had other phones stolen (unfortunately around here this is quite common, even though I live in a very safe city for my country's standards) and we've blocked the IMEI and deleted data through the Google account. But that wasn't the case with this one. There was never an explicit intention on our part to render this cell phone unusable. He just stayed in the drawer with an account that was deleted.

@codingfreedom welp you dont actually need a google account to use a phone. Next time that could be a possibilty!
With Aurora app store or UpToDownStore for example you can get any app thats on the playstore anyways.

@joewilliams007 Thank you for the tip. But we did it! There's a pretty crazy path we managed to do to open chrome and install an APK that registered the new account.

It's impressive, having to hack your own smartphone.

Well, it was just another Sunday in front of the computer.

OMFG...

If you had any important info on the stolen phone, like a bank account linked to the Google account, then you might have some bigger problems right now

@hinst The stolen smartphone has been unliked from accounts and blocked by IMEI on same day. All right now...

I've followed some tutorials before to hack my way around some FRP locked phones I legally own. It's a ridiculous feature that aims to make phones single use items. It disturbs second hand market and apparently also reusing your own phone like in this case. It doesn't reduce phone theft either since the criminals surely know how to bypass the lock, but that doesn't matter since it wasn't the intention of the feature anyway.

@Hazarth FRP lock persists over factory reset, hence the name Factory Reset Protection. It's a feature for preventing reuse of phones, aiming to make them single use items.

@electrineer I fully agree.

@electrineer ah, this is new info for me! thanks... weird decision to make it tied to a google acc lol