Elisa Saunalahti prepaid number PUK lost - am I irrevocably screwed?

By mistake, my kid entered the wrong PIN twice, and it went into PUK mode. I no longer hold the PUK as the simcard itself is 7 years old.

I am not a regular phone user. Plus, most of my usage is on the postpaid sponsored by my employer. As an immigrant, I definitely need a permanent number, and a POSTPAID doesn't quite fit the pocket.

A permanent prepaid number helps me keep in touch with everything outside my employment sphere, including the banks in my own country.

The good part? It didn't happen to me for the last 7 years during which I held the same prepaid number, and paid ELISA a ton of money in the process.

The bad part? You guessed it, but let me write it anyway.

Calling Elisa customer care resulted in the following information, with a lot of "unfortunately"s:

• Without PUK, it is impossible to UNLOCK the SIM, even if I remember the correct PIN.
• New PUK can't be obtained for a PREPAID number
• New SIM with the same number cannot be obtained

As a prepaid customer who has lived in several countries, I feel this is a problem limited to Finland wherein you can neither renew your PREPAID SIM CARD, nor regain access to it if it gets locked.

As an IT person, I am baffled: How can phone companies design a system (business model) to leave their customers in no-man's-land like this? What if I had money on this card? Doesn't this put POSTPAID customers on a way higher PRIVILEGE status compared to PREPAID ones?

What set of universal rules govern loss/damage/locking of prepaid phone cards?