why do they bother. It would maybe be a little less obvious if They lived in London and want to move to the Australia and doubted anyone could fix their problem.
I have found that a standard laundry tub acts as a half wavelength waveguide which will cause the phone to transmit twice the distance, this will not unlock the phone though, so to get the phone to reset and unlock you must attenuate the signal by at least 3db. filling the "waveguide" or laundry sink with H2O will allow this reset to occour.