Phone PUK number

PUKs are for resetting the SIM, nothing to do with the phone.

Are you saying you bought a phone with a SIM card already installed ?

No, I bought a Huawei P30 Pro phone in 2019 from Amazon. I recently locked myself out by following instructions to lock the sim card from the scam guru on the BBC Morning Live programme. I contacted EE on the website, but they said they would contact me in seven days, that not being satisfactory I went to an EE shop on Saturday, where the assistant contacted EE for me, apparently the phone account was registered to someone in Romford. I originally had sim only with Plusnet, but they wanted to stop doing sim only, so I moved to EE in 2023. I was wondering if the phone had been returned to Amazon from a previous purchase, who may have still had the original sim details.

The phone number associated with a sim may be recycled or reused after a quarantine period. The old sim gets deactivated if not used for a period of time (180 days in my case but it could be 6+ months). There then is a quarantine period before some(all) suppliers reuse the number.

When I changed phones which required a physically smaller sim card I was able to transfer the number from the old sim to the new sim, at which point the old sim ceased to work for making calls.