Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that person would be able buy a refurbished phone from a source like Gazelle that insures that the rightful owner has deactivated the phone and knows that it isn’t stolen.
There are a zillion phones that come to be refurbished because they originally had corporate owners. The IT department issues new phones and ends up with a giant pile of old phones, many of which are damaged, which aren't worth their time to sort out and resell, so they get thrown on a pallet and go in bulk to an electronics recycler. The recycler sorts the phones from the PCs from the laser printers and the phones g…
This isn’t far fetched. Many SIM swaps are done by employees of carriers taking bribes to help thieves perform SIM swaps. They aren’t all done by social engineering.
Now suppose none of that occurs and Apple unlocks phones. Now a phone that has user data on it that was formerly encrypted is available to a third party.
Yes Apple could perform a remote wipe, but again why would Apple want to get in the middle of that? What if someone was being malicious and copied someone’s serial number and asked Apple to do a remote wipe?
Long story short, if the phone wasn’t unlocked before it was given to the refurbisher, you have know way of knowing whether the phone was stolen.