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"Most customers opt to wait until the package arrives before they ask for the pictures."

Seems backwards. Photos ought to precede shipping. Sending the photos once the device is in hand makes it much easier for fake photos to be injected. With GPG signing and such it would still be nontrivial, but much easier. Am I missing something?

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I guess the idea is that if the pictures are sent too early, the pictures could be intercepted, phone interdicted, and photos used to help workaround the anti-interdiction protection.

If they wanted to balance these concerns they could always split the photo in half and send half before, half after.

Or, better, the hash of it.

Yeah, hash first, photos later may make the most sense.

Thanks to people chewing through this for me. Always a good exercise.

Couldn't they just take a picture of the phone themselves before tampering with the phone?

Maybe, but then they have to fake the context (camera, lighting, room) and be extremely careful not to accidentally give away clues about their operation.

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