Hacker News Reader

I will have to get him over to the Apple store with the Best Buy receipt then, thank you for that info.

Activation Lock is never dealt at Store level. There is a website specifically for this and the customer should start the procedure online.

Start a request at the end of this page, https://support.apple.com/en-us/108934, if it gets that far, but I would exhaust all options first.

Should look into account password first. If he has started account recovery, Activation Lock removal will fail.