I recently bought a new iphone se 64gb. I turned it on, signed in to my icloud account and selected my previous iphone's backup from icloud. After this, a screen displayed a message: Setting up your apple id. The screen after this message, displayed a prompt for password of an unknown email account that I have never used or known! This prompt suggested me to :
Enter the Apple ID password for unknown_email to use for store purchases (including the App Store, Itunes Store and iBooks Store).
I clicked the back button and switched off my new iphone se. Contacted apple via email, chat and telephone and even went to an apple store. Over telephone I was suggested to setup as a new phone and then reset it completely and then try the backup option again… the problem was still there. After that I was suggested to restore it via itunes. I updated it and restored it via itunes, and still the problem remained.
I had bought this iphone via Amazon India and I tried returning this iphone via the amazon website and was told to contact the apple support number for returns.
Please could anyone recommend me what I should do?
Best Answer
I remembered I had this issue when I was restoring an iPhone 5s backup to the iPhone 6 I bought at launch in 2014. I had a string of unknown email addresses pop-up asking for passwords to enable store purchases. Obviously the phone could not have been used or stolen as I received it on launch day directly from Apple.
The issue is that content originally purchased from an iTunes store was obtained from other people and on your prior device at the time of backup, such as music, eBooks or videos.
In turn, when you make a backup of your device, for purchased content iTunes/iCloud doesn't store the content directly in the backup. It simply logs (essentially) the content ID and the account used to purchase it. When you restore a backup, it prompts you to login to each account that the backup knows about so it can re-download the purchased content.
If you bypass that password screen for the unknown email, you will simply get an error message stating:
After the restore is completed, sync with iTunes to add the content back directly from your computer.
The device is not stolen or compromised, nor is your Apple ID.