Or so he thought.

One night, he met a phone reseller in a Chandni Chowk market. The man had a drawer full of Nokia 7.2 motherboards—water-damaged, cracked, but with clean, untouched IMEIs stored in their secure e-fuses. “Fifty dollars,” the man said. “Swap the board. No crime. No scripts. No ghosts.”

And the network always, eventually, checks the signature.

He launched the firehose loader. The command line scrolled white text: