Contact the owner of the MDM and see if they can release it since I’ll assume your acquisition was lawful.
Apple will assist if you are the original owner and present a verifiable bill of sale, otherwise this activation lock is generally not something they will adjust unless there is evidence of a mistake in the serial number that was marked as MDM enrolled.
Other scenarios, get legal advice. That is off topic here, so let’s cover all the on-topic reasons why you won’t contact Apple support to locate the MDM or DEP account that controls that hardware. Going through Apple is the best scenario here for good results.
Answer from bmike on Stack ExchangeVideos
Yo!
I worked for a medium sized tech startup that went bankrupt about a year and a half ago. There was no notice and the entire company was laid off with no severance, while numerous c suite executives and the founder moved to a new company to try the same idea and restart.
I have a company issued MacBook that I just recently started to use. An old coworker has been using hers since the layoff so I figured I’d give mine a go. There’s no way for me to return it as the company no longer exists. We were all fully remote and no emails sent out regarding a return and I was not able to reach anyone shortly after the layoff to ask.
There’s an MDM profile that was setup when I first received the laptop. I’ve been using the laptop just fine for the past couple of days (browsing the web, downloading web browsers, etc) but was wondering if there was a way to remove the MDM and have the laptop be completely ‘old company’ free.
Apologies if this is not the best place to ask, I’ve rarely ever used Mac’s before so I’m pretty basic with all of this stuff.
Appreciate any help or opinions.
EDIT: I found a link from another post, followed the steps and bypassed the MDM completely. No more profiles on the computer and from what I’ve read, can now update / use iCloud and everything else as a normal Mac could.
Link: https://github.com/assafdori/bypass-mdm