The following sounds funny, but I have to anonymise names and ID’s.
Griselda von Zinkelflak was 94 when she passed away 2 years ago in South America.
She left a slightly chaotic estate behind.
She had visited her sister Hedda in the UK well before her death, years before COVID. During this time she used Hedda’s iPad which wasn’t fully set up at the time. Hedda was/is also not the youngest, she is still around.
Griselda asked an assistant (or random visitor, we don’t know) to finish setting up the borrowed iPad. This included setting up an AppleID.
The assistant did not know how to spell Griselda’s name and set up an AppleID/email address GriseldavonZinkelflack@iCloud.com (please note the last few letters are wrongly “flack”, not “flak”.
We have no access to such iCloud ID or email account, nobody in her former country-home in South America had ever anything to do with an iPad that Griselda had only borrowed.
Hedda herself has no clue what kind of password Griselda might have used for those fateful four days during the aforementioned visit. At any rate, it wasn’t Griselda anyway, but an assistant who set this up.
It’s an iPad 2 from 2014, max iOS 9.3.5
I have carried out a full RESTORE via a MacBook, it ends still in an activation lock, asking for access to GriseldavonZinkelflack@iCloud.com or a phone number that hasn’t existed anymore for some years.
Maybe Apple can grant you access to her iCloud e-mail, but you should expect them to demand massive amounts of documentation, proving that she has passed on and that you have legal rights to her estate.
I presume that you don’t have documentation to prove ownership of the device. If you can prove ownership, you can contact Apple Support and get a bypass code.
Absent the Apple ID credentials, there isn’t much you can do. There are some unauthorized methods that work with old iDevices, but the providers of such tools can be shady, i.e., vectors of malware. Basically, these tools leverage known vulnerabilities in the device to enable access.
I can’t recommend a particular tool, but if you want to go down that road, your device should be old enough that these methods can work. Just beware that you may be exposing anything confidential on the device to potentially malevolent actors.
I’d say given the age of the iPad, the inaccessiblity of files and data hasn’t needed to be addressed for multiple years, and the difficulty and risks of defeating Activation Lock, that the best path forward is to simply buy a new iPad.
You and I know that, but Apple doesn’t. Maybe that iPad has some old Bitcoin keys on it. Griselda may have been a crypto multi-millionaire, and the TidBITS international hacking ring may be on her trail! Maybe that’s why the site has been a little slow lately.
Yeah well, the more elaborate a story gets, the more unlikely they seem. Just the other week I saw a hippo crossing the road from the left, whilst a penguin was stocking up on his weekly grocery at a supermarket. Google “German Carnival” images for further details.
I will file a recovery request with Apple and see what they might say. Should I find substantial crypto assets, I might suddenly have many new friends.
