I purchased a used Verizon iPhone 4 and want to activate it on my Verizon account?

A friend uses her dad's old iPhone on her AT&T account as her phone without a data plan. I want to do the same and replace my 12 year old's flip phone. Verizon says I must purchase another data plan to activate this phone to my account. Any suggestions? Otherwise we're thru with Verizon.

What you need to do is to contact Verizon (either at their call in customer service, or at a Verizon store), make the changes to the account to enable a data plan to be on the account, then provide the IMEI of the phone to Verizon, wait to be prompted to dial [*228] on the phone and follow the prompts.

Aside from wait times, this all should be able to be done within 20-30 minutes.

The only real hold-ups in the process is that you need to be an authorized account user to make those changes, which requires being able to provide account passwords and such. Also, if the phone has a bad ESN (electronic serial number), it will not be able to be activated due to the phone being reported lost or stolen or being on an account that is massively past due.