As first spotted by Wired, there are currently about 9,000 listings on eBay for various smartphones that already have TikTok installed. There is a wide selection of devices depending on the make, model, and carrier you prefer. For example, you can buy a Samsung Galaxy A54 5G with TikTok on Consumer Cellular for $250 or an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max compatible with T-Mobile for $450. But for the most part, if you want to buy one of these devices from TikTok, you’ll have to be prepared to shell out much, much more than the MSRP.
Most of the ads have at least three zeros at the end, meaning that the starting price is in the thousands, such as this iPhone 14 that is currently listed for $7,500 and has one person in their cart at the time of publication. There are currently a few ads asking for tens of thousands of dollars, including one that has a price of $50,000 (or the best offer, but either way you still have to pay for shipping, which honestly seems a bit petty).
It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between items listed for sale at that price and people actually buying them. Although some ads for the sale of phones with TikTok installed have thousands of views in the last 24 hours, there is much more attention to them than sales. Most of the devices sold, as shown by the “completed sales” filter on eBay, indicate that sellers often agreed to the offer rather than the price list. However, some people successfully make money from opportunism: There is an ad for an iPhone 16 Pro Max for $12,999 (although the seller has no history on the platform, so it is quite possible that this is a fake sale).
This phenomenon has happened before. When Flappy Bird was all the rage, and its creator eventually decided to remove the app for his own health, phones that had the game installed were also sold on eBay, including one device that sparked a bidding war that ended in a $99,900 victory. Ultimately, eBay blocked this sale because it requires all phones sold on its platform to be wiped and restored to factory settings before shipping.
It looks like eBay still requires a factory reset for devices sold through its marketplace, so let’s hope that the sellers who sold the phone with TikTok installed haven’t spent their earnings yet.
