The euphoria of Apple’s iPhones have not yet settled down when the case of a million of Apple iPhones being missing rocked the American market. Apple in one of its press releases has announced selling 3.75 million iPhones through the end of previous year.

Now, in most countries where Apple has released their iPhone, it has chosen to offer only a single phone network to provide service for the handsets. AT&T which is Apple’s service provider for iPhones in the United States has declared of activating little less than 2 million phones.

This has raised the big question. If not activated, what happened to those 1 million remaining phones which Apple has sold at the year end? Why have the owners not activated the iPhones while statistics says that every iPhone is activated within 3 days of it being bought (approximately).

Are the iPhones been unlocked and sold? Apple is critical over the whole issue. They say that it very complicated to unlock an iPhone. They have been so designed that iPhones can be “unlocked” to work on other networks, but an attempt to do so will void the phone’s warranty. Also, Apple foreseeing, the use of other types of software modification, known as a ‘jailbreak’ which allows users to install non-Apple software such as games on their iPhones, will lead to void the warranty of the iPhone.

Though, Wall Street analysts have begun a global search for the 1.7 million lost iPhones, preliminary investigations have shown that a large quantity of the iPhones might have been bought and unlocked to use on carriers other than AT&T in the United States and on Apple’s partner carriers in Europe.

However, there has also been an indication that Apple iPhones have found their way to countries beyond the U.S and European market. Markets in Thailand, Australia, Columbia, China, India, South America, New Zealand, Russia and Kuwait among many other countries are openly selling iPhones in the market, even though Apple has not launched them in those markets.

Apple is now contemplating launching and expanding the iPhones in other countries also to cut down the grey market of iPhones.