Huh? What user? I think you misunderstand the pipeline. When they steal my phone, they’re not refurbishing
my phone to resell it. They’re
scrapping my phone — taking all the expensive components out of my phone: the screen, the touch sensor, etc — and selling them to repair shops to be used as parts to repair
other people’s phones. People who, obviously, authorize those repairs. But I don’t!
(If you know what an illegal car “chop shop” is, they operate under the same business model: stolen preowned product as an input, replacement parts sold to repair shops — or used in their own “repair shop” — as an output.)
The exact point of “hardware DRM” is that it allows me to retroactively revoke my consent for the parts of my phone to ever be used again inside some other person’s phone, through the cloud, at the moment I realize my phone has already been stolen.
(Also, FYI, there’s nothing specifically Chinese about this pipeline. It’s not like this is a scam being run by the Triads or anything. Rather, it’s just unchecked capitalism. The gangs that go around stealing phones are small-time local groups of thieves, who have realized they can make a buck by selling and delivering wholesale lots of these phones to amoral “phone chop-shops” who happen to reside in Shenzhen. Those “phone chop-shops” are only in Shenzhen because that’s where all the demand is for the huge number of parts generated by scrapping a phone, and because they can’t sell these parts on without cash-only handshake deals.)
To be clear, the “phone chop-shop” never ask any gangs to steal phones for them, either. They just say they’ll “buy phones in any condition.” (Which is why I say they’re amoral, not immoral.) Everything that happens from then on is the natural consequence of a market optimizing for profitability.
On a related topic, the true point of Apple’s “authorized repair” program, was to penalize any repair shop who knowingly purchased parts from a “phone chop-shop” by disallowing them from ever again purchasing genuine parts; thus creating a disincentive from ever buying these grey-market parts.