HT201263 Bought second hand iPhone not realising logged into iCloud, Please help me remedy this problem?

Question

Hi there good people, I recently purchased an iPhone 4 from a sales site on Facebook, I checked to see that the phone was not signed in to App Store/iTunes but didn't occur to me that it could still be logged into iCloud (Which it is) as I thought you could only use 1 Apple ID per handset at any given time.  3 months have passed and all was fine, until today when I dropped the phone and now a box pops up wanting iCloud password every 5 Seconds after I've cancelled the last one.  I got in contact with the guy I bought it from but as three months have passed he says he can't remember the password he used and was not able to log out of iCloud because of this. (plus he's switched to Android)  I took the phone to my local phone repair shop and they told me there is nothing can be done without the account password, my question is:  Will the "Recovery Mode" trick work with this problem?  I'm sorry but I simply refuse to believe that there is no solution or way round this... I know Apple are very tight on security but what would I have done if this was a brand new iPhone 6 instead, would I simply accept that I was the proud owner of an extremely expensive house brick?  I welcome any advice that might help me to reset the damned phone... Thanking you in advance for your time and effort.  Daniel Grant.

Answer 1

Welcome to the Apple community.
Unfortunately, you cannot do very much with your phone unless you get assistance
from the previous owner, they should either provide you with the password to
unlock it or remove their account from the phone entirely remotely through
iCloud.com > Find My Phone.