SIM card region locked on old Smartphone (Galaxy A40)

[Members_VpjweQH]

Hello, currently I am on vacation in egypt and bought a SIM card for mobile data during my time here. While this works on any other Samsung Smartphone of my family on my phone (Galaxy A40) I got a notification that I am region locked and require a code to unlock my phone. As far as I understand this should only happen on brand new phones with SIM cards from a different region but in my case I have an old smartphone which I used for years at this point at home in germany with a german SIM card so I don't really understand why this shouldn't work with my smartphone as it should be fully unlocked as well. The Samsung whatsapp support wasn't really helpful why this happened to me and gave conflicting information saying that foreign SIM cards should be unrestricted after the first activation while another person said that it will only work in the EU. So is my phone somehow unlike every other Samsung phone unusable outside of Europe??? Also they want a proof of purchase to unlock my phone which I obviously don't have with me on vacation.

[BandOfBrothers]

This type of issue does normally lead to the phone being locked by your network so it wouldn't accept other sim cards from another network @Members_VpjweQH 

A region lock by Samsung would stop sim cards being used in the phone if say the phone had been released in another country ,and then imported into another country to use. 

The way to remove that would be to use a local sim card in the phone where it was first released via a 5 minute phone call. Thankfully Samsung do not appear to apply region locks anymore. 

There maybe a shop where you are that can unlock phone's to all networks. 

If i can be of any further help please don't hesitate to ask  😎 

[Members_VpjweQH]

I contacted my network provider before and they said that this has nothing to do with them and that I should contact the manufacturer of the phone (Samsung). 5min call is probably very expensive from here with my old SIM card. At least the hotel WiFi here is better than on previous vacations...