Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi Router (Open Box)

I have a policy of not buying refurbished, and I broke that policy just this time, and boy do I regret it. Beyond the obvious reasons to not go the refurbished route, I just ran into the biggest reason to not buy refurbished tech. These netgear routers are tied to individual netgear accounts, and even though amazon resets them and wipes all the previous info out of them and puts the generic info back in, they're still tied to the previous owners, by the serial number, to their netgear accounts. So for example, I wanted a router that can download and run my vpn. With this one, even though I have my own netgear account, I can’t add it to this router because it sees that the products serial number has already been registered to a different account. So I contacted netgear support naturally, they say if I can provide my proof of purchase, they will delete the previous owners account info from the units serial number and it will be all ready to go. So I get them what they need, the send me an email confirmation stating the previous owners info has been deleted. I try entering my info into the unit, it says its still tied to the previous owner. I figure it needs a little time for the system to catch up. I give it a day, try again, still tied to previous owners info. I contact netgear again, they say its all been deleted and im the only one its registered to. I reset the router, delete the trash nighthawk app, reinstall it, try entering my info again, its still tied to previous owner. Needless to say, I’m absolutely done with this thing. It’s being returned ASAP. Learn from my mistakes and just get a new unit, its worth the extra money to avoid spending a bunch of time trying to get something as simple as your info stored in the unit, just to find out netgear support can’t do anything to remedy the issue and have to go through the hassle of having to return it. Never again will I buy a nighthawk router, not just because of this, but because the app is also garbage that you run everything through. It’s extremely buggy and overall just so slow and unintuitive.