I’m reaching out for help with a situation that’s been weighing on my family and me. My father has around 7 million SIM cards, and he’s been holding onto them with the hope that they might still hold some value. My mother has been urging him to let them go, but he still holds onto the belief that maybe they can be reprogrammed and resold. He doesn’t have many people to turn to for advice on this, apart from one occasional visitor who gives him hope every now and then.
I’ve done some technical research and understand that resetting a SIM card’s key identifiers like IMSI and Ki is challenging, if not impossible, on standard commercial SIMs. I’ve looked into tools like pySIM and compatible readers, but I’m struggling to find a clear path forward given these limitations.
If anyone here has any advice, experience, or even an idea on how we might approach this — whether it’s a way to reset the cards to a blank state or insights into their potential resale value as-is — it would mean a lot to me and my family. I just want to see if there’s any way to keep my father’s hope alive and possibly help him realize some value from these cards.
Thanks in advance for any guidance or ideas you might be able to share.
Sadly there is nothing you can do with those cards without any kind of credentials that would identify you as the mobile operator that has had those cards manufactured. Such credentials would be, for example
the ADM1 key or any other ADM key that has permissions to write to all the files on the card
SCP02 or SCP03 key material for GlobalPlatform
SCP80 or SCP81 key material for OTA access
The entire point of the SIM card security architecture is that only the manufacturer and/or issuer of the card (the mobile operator) have this level of access. It’s also the reason why there are products on the market like the sysmoISIM-SJA5 products which provide all those operator credentials together with the cards (which a normal end user of a commercial operator never gets).
After reading laforge’s detailed explanation about why SIM cards can’t be reprogrammed without operator credentials, we started thinking about whether they could still have some value in other ways. Even though their network functionality is locked, their data storage features might still work. SIM cards can store small amounts of data like contacts or SMS messages, so we wondered if they could be useful for tech projects, security experiments, or even recycling for valuable metals like gold from the chips.
Do you think there could still be a market for these cards — maybe among electronics recyclers, tech enthusiasts, or research labs? We’d appreciate any ideas or examples of similar cases where old SIM cards found a second life.
Thanks again to laforge for the helpful insight earlier!