They will give you a new SIM, with a new secret key, and mark the old one as dead. So, all you need to do is contact your phone company, tell them what happened, and get a new SIM. It can never be used to connect to the cellular network again. When the PUK is entered incorrectly 10 times, the SIM assumes that someone who shouldn't be holding it is holding it.
With that knowledge, your question can be answered fairly easily.īut when incorrect PUK is entered 10 times, it is no longer possible to unlock it.
You can think of the SIM as your phone-company-issued ID card: it identifies you, gives you permission to use the phone network, makes your connection through the air from your phone to the nearest tower private, and nothing else. What a SIM does store is a secret key that uniquely identifies your phone to the cellular network, and that your phone company uses to decide if you should be allowed to connect to their towers, what your phone number is, what services you are allowed to use, and how you should be billed. I should be able to throw a SIM away when it's no longer in use, without fear of any data leakage. Today, I would be shocked (and really annoyed) to discover that a phone was storing any personal information on the SIM, because that would allow someone with physical access to my device to be able to (literally) pull that information out of the phone. It's true that technically, a SIM card has the ability to store a limited address book, a small collection of text messages, and some call history, and in the old (pre-smartphone) days, this was super handy when moving to a new device. On a modern phone, none of your personal data will (usually) be stored on the SIM.