Second-hand phones with TikTok installed are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it appears that some people might actually be buying them.
Despite Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban of the social media app for 75 days, the app remains absent from all US app stores—with Apple and Google giving no hints on if it will return. That means if you are in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you are currently locked out, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers and social media managers, that could spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.
Opportunistic eBayers have taken the chance to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings of used smartphones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.
This is possible by the seller signing out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device, rather than wiping the phone back to factory settings. Any buyer would then need to be careful not to sync to any existing cloud backup, to avoid losing the app they’ve paid so much to get.
Some of these phones are listed for as much as $50,000 under eBay’s “Buy It Now” selling format, but it’s hard to believe anyone could truly think their phone would sell for that—and there’s no sign that they have.
There are many more listed at the $2,000-5,000 mark, but as to whether anyone is actually buying them at this price, it still seems unlikely.
What can be said, is that in spite of the inflated prices, there is interest. These phones are selling, but for exactly how much is harder to ascertain. Select the “sold” filter on eBay’s search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but pretty much all of them have an undisclosed “best offer accepted” note connected to them.
Any finished auctions with incredibly inflated prices look to have been relisted shortly after, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those that sit at close-to market value for second-hand phones looking to have actually sold.
A quick glance at auctions that are currently running also show much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.
The true impact of any TikTok premium is somewhat unclear, then, but that isn’t stopping people trying. Results for the TikTok phone search term went up by over 2,000 items during the course of writing this article—a sense of urgency no doubt pushed along by the fact the app could be returned to the app stores at any time.
At the moment, a TikTok search on either app store is met with statements from Google and Apple citing legal requirements as the reason the app is not available on their stores. This is despite the fact that Trump’s executive order clearly instructs the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.”
Whether TikTok reappears before the 75 days is up remains to be seen—as does any deal Trump cuts in the meantime—but those exiled are not completely without options. This week, thousands of users have flocked to another Chinese-owned social media platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling to hire English moderators.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its bit to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a flurry of new familiar features and even offering big influencers as much as $5,000 to join its platforms.