eBay Sellers Are Selling Used TikTok Phones for Thousands of Dollars

Cell phones are TikTok inserts are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it seems that maybe some people are actually buying it.

Even US President Donald Trump signed it Executive Order Monday delaying any ban on the TV app for 75 days, TikTok is still unavailable in all US app stores – Apple and Google give no indication that it will return. This means that if you are in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you are locked out, and have no way to download it again. For content creators, marketers, and social media managers, this can spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.

Lucky eBayers have found a chance to cash in on this disaster. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 lists of uses phones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, both with the TikTok app already installed.

This is possible with the seller simply logging out of the iCloud or Google account connected to the device instead of restoring the phone to factory settings. Any buyer should be careful not to compromise on the cloud backup they have, to avoid losing the software they paid so much for, and to make sure that any security measures are removed by the vendor.

It goes without saying that anyone considering this option should shop very carefully, especially given the asking price that many sellers are trying to charge.

You can find smartphones with TikTok listed in abundance $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now selling model, but it’s hard to believe that anyone would think their phone would sell – and there’s no indication that they have.

There are many others listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but if someone is actually buying it at this price, it still seems unlikely.

What we can say is that, although the prices have gone up a lot, there and interest. These phones and sale, but exactly how much is hard to tell. Select the “sold” filter in the eBay search and there are lots of products that appear to be sold out, but all have the “best in stock” information attached to them.

Any finished products with ridiculously high prices seem to have had their equipment re-listed recently, indicating sales have not been successful, and only those close to the market price of used phones are willing to sell.

A quick look at the current market also shows that these phones are attracting much better prices than a first search would suggest.

Whether the value of TikTok is real is unknown, but this does not stop people from trying. TikTok’s mobile search results rose by more than 2,000 items at the time of writing this article – the momentum is no doubt driven by the fact that the app can be returned to US stores at any time.

At the moment, searching for TikTok on Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store is met with legal statements as to why the app is unavailable. This is despite Trump’s administration instructing the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce this law or impose penalties on any agency for non-compliance with this law.”

Whether the concerns are over and TikTok will come back before the 75-day deadline remains to be seen – as Trump’s current cuts are – but those who have been kicked out of their favorite video-sharing app are having nothing to do with it. This week, thousands of users streamed to another Chinese social media site, RedNote, leaving the app in the dark hiring English managersI will try again capitalize on his new success.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its bit to take lost TikTokers under its wing, launching the number of new productsand even give great influences as $5,000 to match its towers.