Denied: the SIM wasn't in the phone.

The rule, in the terms' own shape

Coverage follows the line, not the object. The plan insures the device that is active on the enrolled line — SIM in, registered on the network, used on that line before the loss. Swap your SIM into a loaner for a week and lose the good phone from a drawer, and the terms give the administrator its argument: the device that was lost was not, at that moment, the covered device.

It is the single least-disclosed condition in the whole product. Nobody at a sales counter has ever said the sentence "this plan insures whichever phone your SIM is in" — because that sentence ends sales.

The counter: the carrier's own activity record

• Carriers log which device was active on your line, and when. Your account's device history is a record the administrator must answer — if it shows your device on the line at the loss date, the denial's premise fails on the carrier's own paper.
• If the SIM genuinely was elsewhere, the argument changes: if a store or agent set up the enrollment wrong (device enrolled over Wi-Fi without activation, wrong device enrolled), the mis-enrollment is the carrier's error — and the carrier executive office, step 4 of the ladder, is where those get fixed.
• Timestamps matter: a phone that logged airtime on the line before the loss satisfies the written term even if the loss-day facts are arguable. Gather the usage record early; it ages out of easy reach.

Before it happens to you

If your SIM lives in a different phone than the one you insured — a work phone, a travel phone, a loaner — the insured phone is the one in the drawer, and it is not covered while the SIM is away. Either keep the SIM in the insured device or accept that the drawer's phone is uninsured. Nobody will tell you this at renewal either. It's in the kit's trap map because it is the trap most likely to be sitting in a reader's house right now.