Used phones with TikTok installed are listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it looks like some people might buy them.
Although US President Donald Trump signed a decree Monday delaying any potential ban on the social media app by 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores, with Apple and Google giving no indication of its return. This means that if you’re in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you’re currently stuck, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers, and social media managers, this could spell disaster. And expensive too.
Opportunistic eBayers took advantage of this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings for used phones. smart phones brands like Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.
This is possible when the seller logs out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device rather than resetting the phone to factory settings. Any buyer will then have to be careful not to synchronize with an existing cloud backup, in order to avoid losing the application for which they paid so much.
Some of these phones are listed as far $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now sales format, but it’s hard to believe that anyone would actually think their phone would sell for that – and there’s no indication that’s the case.
There are many others listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but as to whether anyone is actually buying them at that price, that still seems unlikely.
What we can say is that, despite the inflated prices, there are East interest. These phones are sell, but for exactly how much it is more difficult to determine. Select the “sold” filter in eBay’s search and many sales appear to be completed, but almost all come with an undisclosed “best offer accepted” rating.
All auctions that ended with incredibly inflated prices appear to have been relisted shortly afterward, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those close to the market value of the used phones appearing to have actually been sold.
A quick glance at current auctions also reveals much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.
The true impact of any TikTok bounty is therefore somewhat unclear, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Search results for the phone search term TikTok increased by more than 2,000 items during the writing of this article – a sense of urgency no doubt heightened by the fact that the app could be returned on app stores at any time.
Currently, a search for TikTok 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 Trump’s executive order clearly directing the Justice Department to “take no action to enforce the law or impose sanctions on any entity for any failure to comply with the law.”
Whether TikTok will reemerge before the 75-day deadline is up remains to be seen – like any deal Trump makes in the meantime – but the exiles are not completely without options. This week, thousands of users have flocked to another Chinese social media platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling to hire English moderators.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also done its part to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a a wave of familiar new features and even offer major influencers as much $5,000 to join its platforms.